A team at Ordnance Survey has created a map of Great Britain within Minecraft. Featuring 22 billion blocks, the new map has been made available for download as a new Minecraft world.
The national mapping authority reported that it has created the Minecraft world which represents over 224,000 square kilometres of Great Britain. Dubbed Minecraft GB terrain, the map was created using OS Terrain 50, a three-dimensional model of the bare earth surface known as a Digital Terrain Model. OS VectorMap District, a backdrop map product, was then used to extract surface features such as water, woodland and roads based on pixel colours and densities. This information was then used to modify the material of individual blocks in the Minecraft GB world.
Graham Dunlop, innovation lab manager at Ordnance Survey, explained that the idea for the project came from a keen Minecraft fan, Joseph Braybrook, who joined the team as part of Ordnance Survey’s summer internship programme. "We decided to explore the potential educational benefits of the popular video game".
The new Minecraft GB world is now available to download by any of Minecraft’s 33 million active users with a licence. Players can use the new world to fly across the country and see different environments such as Snowdonia, Poole Harbour and central London. All players will enter the virtual 3D world at the OS head office in Southampton.
Graham added: “We think we may have created the largest Minecraft world ever built based on real-world data."
Ordnance Survey has also linked the world to its popular OS getamap service to enable players to navigate to some familiar places. Players can use the service to search for a location and capture the grid reference displayed on the screen. Using this, a conversion tool can then generate the Minecraft teleport command with the correct world coordinates.
Andoid Games
No comments:
Post a Comment