Quirky: A recent Heise article covers how a Swiss student recreated Switzerland in Minecraft at 1:1 scale. From the article:
A 22-year-old student at ETH Zurich thinks on a very small scale – literally: He has recreated Switzerland as an explorable Minecraft world. Rather than placing every block by hand, he generated the world automatically from official geodata. In the “Blocks” project, one block represents one meter, and the world covers the country’s entire area of 41,285 square kilometers.
The project uses mostly federal geodata: terrain data from swissALTI3D, limnology from swissBATHY3D, forest canopy and tree heights from swissSURFACE3D, building data from swissBUILDINGS3D, rock formations from GeoCover, several objects from the Swiss landscape model data product swissTLM3D and from SWISSIMAGE1 aerial imagery and a few more data sources.
Part of this model is accesible free of charge, part of it has a fee attached to it. Certainly one of the more “out there” uses of open geodata by Switzerland’s public administration.
The article also points to Manifold (of which the Minecraft project is a subdomain), another project by the same author that offers custom extents of Switzerland converted to solids in the STL2 format ready for 3D printing.
Footnotes
Consistency pet peeve: I feel this should be branded “swissIMAGE”.↩︎
STL (usually read as “stereolithography”, sometimes “standard triangle/tessellation language”) is a file format created in the 1980s for first commercial 3D printers. It describes the surface geometry of an object as a mesh of triangles, without colour, texture or units, and remains the de facto standard for 3D printing.↩︎