"Building a Virtual City from the Real World"
Published by KermMartian
10 years, 2 months ago (2014-01-30T17:44:32+00:00)
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Cemetech members who have been around for a few months may be familiar with the SparseWorld project from Cemetech Labs. For everyone else, SparseWorld is an attempt to harness the power of modern computing and the scope of available datasets to automatically build recognizable virtual cities from the real world. Three trends in modern computing have now come together to make accurate virtual copies of real-world locations possible: the creation of detailed models of buildings used in tools like Google Earth, Bing Maps, and Here.com maps, the availability of high-resolution satellite imagery, and the proliferation of techniques to process huge quantities of data in the name of "Big Data". The SparseWorld project aims to take advantage of these three trends to create 1:1 copies of cities in the popular sandbox game Minecraft.
I have written an article for Technophilic Magazine about SparseWorld, published yesterday. It explains some of the motivation behind SparseWorld, lays out the current conversion process and technical challenges I have faced creating the project, and looks to the future tasks I'll have to confront to complete SparseWorld. If you're curious about the status of the project, I recommend that you check out the article (as well as the other technology-related stories Technophilic covers). You may recall that I previous wrote "Self-Teaching a Love of STEM" for the same publication, explaining how I got into Electrical Engineering, programming, and calculators.
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"Building a Virtual City from the Real World"
SparseWorld project page
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Cemetech members who have been around for a few months may be familiar with the SparseWorld project from Cemetech Labs. For everyone else, SparseWorld is an attempt to harness the power of modern computing and the scope of available datasets to automatically build recognizable virtual cities from the real world. Three trends in modern computing have now come together to make accurate virtual copies of real-world locations possible: the creation of detailed models of buildings used in tools like Google Earth, Bing Maps, and Here.com maps, the availability of high-resolution satellite imagery, and the proliferation of techniques to process huge quantities of data in the name of "Big Data". The SparseWorld project aims to take advantage of these three trends to create 1:1 copies of cities in the popular sandbox game Minecraft.
I have written an article for Technophilic Magazine about SparseWorld, published yesterday. It explains some of the motivation behind SparseWorld, lays out the current conversion process and technical challenges I have faced creating the project, and looks to the future tasks I'll have to confront to complete SparseWorld. If you're curious about the status of the project, I recommend that you check out the article (as well as the other technology-related stories Technophilic covers). You may recall that I previous wrote "Self-Teaching a Love of STEM" for the same publication, explaining how I got into Electrical Engineering, programming, and calculators.
Read More
"Building a Virtual City from the Real World"
SparseWorld project page
Permalink
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