Mad with power, researcher and Minecraft fan creates a way to voxelize the whole world

GamesSurvival & CraftingMinecraftMad with power, researcher and Minecraft fan creates a way to voxelize the whole worldWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Ryan Hardesty Lewis and Google)

An aerial image of downtown prague voxelized using minecraft blocks

“The pipeline we developed starts with Google’s high-resolution 3D Tiles, which are then decomposed into voxels, assigned colors and textures, and exported,” LewistoldSIGGRAPH. “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’s the basics, which seems fairly straightforward, right? Match colors, make voxels. It’s the next part that makes it impressive—to me, at least.

“We also design an [machine learning] algorithm that then maps these voxels to Minecraft blocks, all the while preserving the environmental context and functionality within the game,” said 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 a Minecraft representation.”

Lewis will present a paper about his technique at the upcoming SIGGRAPH conference, a specialist computing group dedicated to the study of computer graphics. PC Gamer has previously covered some wondrous graphics and simulation innovations out of SIGGRAPH—like the eye-popping glory of putting on socks.

You can read a full interview with Lewison SIGGRAPH’s website, and you can check out more details and gifs of the project in action onvoxelearth.org. Those industry professionals lucky enough to attend SIGGRAPH will be able to go seeVoxelizing Google Earthand play around with it next month.

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