An enthusiast has learned to turn Google maps into Minecraft worlds

A graduate student at New York's Cornell University has created a program that turns Google maps into Minecraft worlds. The algorithm automatically replaces all objects with voxel-based structures.

Voxel Earth technology processes a high-resolution 3D map of the terrain and then exports part of the terrain to Minecraft, recreating objects from blocks of the corresponding color. According to the creator of the program, Ryan Lewis, over hundreds of hours in Minecraft he had accumulated a lot of unfinished cities and monuments, so he decided to entrust this work to the algorithm.

In the future, the graduate student intends to expand the functionality of the program by teaching it to recognize natural objects and select appropriate blocks from Minecraft — for example, water blocks for rivers. The developer believes that Voxel Earth can be an excellent school textbook for geography and ecology lessons, and will also be of interest to gamers.

Recently, another enthusiast created a real neural network inside Minecraft.