Researcher and Minecraft Fan Finds Way To Voxelize The World

What if you could take Google’s 3D photogrammetry and turn it into Minecraft blocks? Well, now you can! Not only is this amazing, but it’s a total bummer for those who spend years recreating something in painstaking detail in Minecraft by hand, only to find out, it’s now possible with digital magic.

Google Maps to Minecraft?

Graduate student Ryan Hardesty Lewis at Cornell Tech in New York, who is obviously a Minecraft fan, has built a tool that can take one of Google Maps’ 3D tiles and turn it into Minecraft voxels. The results are good too!

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

Minecraft has already proven to be a powerful educational tool. Now with further applications in the field of geography and environmental sciences, it’s sure to continue that trend. Lewis will present a paper about his technique at the upcoming SIGGRAPH conference, and who knows, hopefully it’ll find its way into the public domain so we can all have a play with this impressive tool.