A researcher has constructed a pipeline of instruments to show one in all Google Maps’ 3D tiles right into a world of voxels in Minecraft, with the consequence being a surprisingly good wanting and simply deeply spectacular course of that spits out voxelized variations of the earth. Created by graduate scholar Ryan Hardesty Lewis at Cornell Tech in New York, the Voxel Earth approach spits out voxels that may be exported to Minecraft, a browser, or no matter it’s you need to see a little bit of voxelized Earth.
“The pipeline we developed begins with Google’s high-resolution 3D Tiles, that are then decomposed into voxels, assigned colours and textures, and exported,” Lewis instructed SIGGRAPH. “We use an algorithm to assign shade and materials properties primarily based on the unique photogrammetry information, which makes the world vastly extra recognizable, quite than being just a little greater than colorless blocks in town-like shapes.”
That is the fundamentals, which appears pretty simple, proper? Match colours, make voxels. It is the following half that makes it spectacular—to me, a minimum of.
“We additionally design an [machine learning] algorithm that then maps these voxels to Minecraft blocks, all of the whereas preserving the environmental context and performance inside the recreation,” mentioned Lewis. “For instance, water blocks signifying a river may usually be simply blue voxels, however we are able to do issues like acknowledge the elevation and extent to say it’s a river or ocean, and change it with a water block as an alternative in a Minecraft illustration.”
Lewis says he hopes it may be utilized by educators to show maps into dynamic classes in fields like geography, environmental science, and concrete planning. He is additionally certain that players will take pleasure in utilizing it to mess around with real-world places.
Lewis will current a paper about his approach on the upcoming SIGGRAPH convention, a specialist computing group devoted to the research of pc graphics. PC Gamer has beforehand coated some wondrous graphics and simulation improvements out of SIGGRAPH—just like the eye-popping glory of placing on socks.
You may learn a full interview with Lewis on SIGGRAPH’s web site, and you may take a look at extra particulars and gifs of the challenge in motion on voxelearth.org. These trade professionals fortunate sufficient to attend SIGGRAPH will be capable of go see Voxelizing Google Earth and mess around with it subsequent month.
