The technique turns Google’s 3D photogrammetry into Minecraft blocks.
A researcher has built a pipeline of tools to turn one of Google Maps’ 3D tiles into a world of voxels in Minecraft, with the result being a surprisingly good looking and just deeply impressive process that spits out voxelized versions of the earth. Created by graduate student Ryan Hardesty Lewis at Cornell Tech in New York, the Voxel Earth technique spits out voxels that can be exported to Minecraft, a browser, or whatever it is you want to see a bit of voxelized 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 told 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.
