Data Games: Magic Minecraft Map Maker

The Magic Minecraft Map Maker was developed by a member of the University’s Web and Data Innovation and Development Team; it uses open LIDAR data (which measures the height of the ground using lasers) to generate maps of real world locations that can be explored in Minecraft, a creative sandbox game.

A demo of the tool can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUXi8SK39_Q

If you want to download and install this tool at home, you can get it from: https://github.com/cgutteridge/geocraft

Excercise:

Watch the above video and then, in your groups, discuss:

Do you think this is a good way of visualising data? Why? Why not?

What other data sources could be combined with the LIDAR to produce interesting visualisations?

How could you leverage the inherent interactivity of Minecraft (for example, placing or destroying blocks) to engage people with the data?