A Researcher who Loves Minecraft Devises a Method to Voxelize the Entire World

A researcher created a pipeline of tools to convert a 3D tile from Google Maps into a voxel world in Minecraft. The technique generates voxelized representations of the planet, and it looks quite decent. The Voxel Earth approach was developed by Cornell Tech graduate student Ryan Hardesty Lewis in New York. It generates voxels that may be exported to a browser, Minecraft, or any other application where you wish to see a voxelized version of Earth.

"The pipeline we developed starts with Google’s high-resolution 3D Tiles, which are then decomposed into voxels, assigned colors and textures, and exported," Lewis stated at SIGGRAPH."We use an algorithm to assign color and material properties based on the original photogrammetry data, which makes the world vastly more recognizable,rather than being a little more than colorless blocks in town-like shapes."

That covers the fundamentals, which seem rather simple, don't they? Make voxels by matching colors. The amazing portion, at least for me, comes in the next section."Additionally, we create a [machine learning] algorithm that converts these voxels into Minecraft blocks while maintaining the game's functionality and surrounding surroundings, according to Lewis."For example, water blocks signifying a river might normally be just blue voxels, but we can do things like recognize the elevation and extent to say it is a river or ocean, and replace it with a water block instead in Minecraft representation."

Lewis adds that he believes instructors will be able to utilize it to create engaging courses using maps in subjects like geography, environmental science, and urban planning. Additionally, he is confident that players would take pleasure in experimenting with actual locales.

At the next SIGGRAPH conference, a specialized computing organization devoted to the study of computer graphics, Lewis will give a paper regarding his method. Some amazing simulation and graphics advances at SIGGRAPH, such breathtaking beauty of putting on socks, have already been reported by PC Gamer.

On the SIGGRAPH website, you can read the entire interview with Lewis. On voxelearth.org, you can see additional information and gifs of the project in action. Next month, industry professionals who were fortunate enough to attend SIGGRAPH will have the opportunity to witness and interact with Voxelizing Google Earth.