See the Isle of Wight like never before!
Once I had finished everything, I was surprisingly ahead of schedule and I thought to myself how nice it would have been to have a tool that projected open street map roads and building outlines into Minecraft... I happen to be a computer programmer and do quite a lot of work in the area of Open Data so decided to try to write it.
The first version was useful but boring as you can see from the picture on the left. It works out for each block what the real world latitude and longitude would be then looks at openstreetmap to see what colour that bit is and sets a block based on that... water, grass etc.
The screenshot is the area around Ventnor Library run through this process.
To make it more interesting I then ran it over Southampton, using LIDAR data from Hampshire Hub (Hampshire country-council open data service). This data gave a reading of how high the ground was on a 20m grid of all of Hampshire and was open data (thanks!).
LIDAR is a distance-measuring laser that is waved around from an aeroplane, usually at the same time as doing aerial photography.
I also set buildings to be 10 blocks high. It looks a bit weird that the tops of the buildings follow the slopes, but generally it worked nicely. The data didn't quite line up and I had to apply a fiddle factor -- I suspect that I have an error in my geometric conversions somewhere. Ah well, works OK warts and all...
This picture is Highfield Campus at the University of Southampton
I went along with this to a map-maker's club in Southampton, run by someone from Ordnance Survey. There I met a lady who works for the Oceanography Center who told me about the wonderful open data they have buried in their site. This includes 1m scale LIDAR for the coast of much of the UK, including Ventnor. Unlike the Hampshire Hub data this doesn't remove buildings and trees, so no need to do my extrude trick. As you can see the results are slightly wobbly but pretty cool and make a great basis for making proper models of the town.
The screenshot is the area around Ventnor Library with the Channel Coast Observatory LIDAR data applied.
Where it came out really cool is along the cliffs and coast. It's a bit gutting to see the cascade and cliffs rendered automatically after spending night after night pouring over reference photos trying to build it by hand!
The final version is about 3000x2000 blocks and extends from The Undercliff to Bonchurch, the beach to Upper Ventnor.
An unexpected application is shown here, where you can see clearly an error in the Open Street Map data (which someone nice has now corrected as a result).
This entire huge version of Ventnor is free to download, modify and redistribute so long as you credit: Christopher Gutteridge, Open Street Map and the Channel Coast Observatory for our contributions.
My name's Christopher Gutteridge. I grew up (ish) in Ventnor but moved away in 1997. I've been coming to Ventnor Fringe Festivals since it began, but this is the first year I've made an "artistic" contribution.
I spend most of the rest of my time working for the Web & Data Innovation & Development Team at the University of Southampton. The most interesting stuff I work on is open access to research papers, open data and research data management.
Mail: 
Twits: @cgutteridge |
Minecraft: cgutteridge
Thanks to...
Ventnor in Minecraft!
