GIS professionals are experiencing excellent results combining GIS and gaming worlds such as Minecraft to engage wider and younger audiences to solve real problems. City planning, crisis management (floods, fires, etc.) and other tasks become fun and accessible to the public. Attendees will discover how to move IFC, Revit, CityEngine, and all kinds of other data through ArcGIS and into Minecraft using the ArcGIS Data Interoperability Extension. Implemented customer examples will be presented alongside strategies and tips, equipping attendees to implement these skills themselves.

1. Create Minecraft Worlds
with ArcGIS and the Data Interoperability Extension

2. Brought to you by:
Safe Software
- Makers of FME & Data Interop -

3. hobbymb

4. What Geospatial use do have in mind
for Minecraft?
• 36% - Urban Planning
• 17% - Disaster planning
• 37% - Community engagement
• 27% - Gaming / time wasting
• 28% - What is this Minecraft thing?

5. Players are placed in a borderless,
randomly generated land with no supplies,
directions, or objective. It's up to them to
decide what to do. By collecting materials
from the world players can ‘craft’ items and
build whatever their minds can imagine.
learningworksforkids.com

7. Source: Ulf Masson (SWECO)
Complex worlds
dreamed up by
kids and created
in Minecraft.

8. A 10 Year Old
City Planner?

9. Real-World Value

10. Education

11.  Reconstructing
historical maps
 Living in a different
era
 Simulating natural
disasters
 Man’s impact on the
world (i.e. raising sea
levels)
 Problem solving

12. City Planning &
Crowd Sourcing

13. A 10 Year old
City Planner?
“Block by Block involves young people in the planning of urban
public spaces. Minecraft has turned out to be the perfect tool to
facilitate this process.” Source: http://blockbyblock.org/

14. Having Fun

15.  Live in a new world
 Design mazes and
rollercoasters
 Race across city
streets
 Make something
explode
 Explore caves

16. Appeal to a wider audience
3 Keys:
Make it easy.
Make it cheap.
Make it fun.

17. blog.safe.com
Norway Minecraft
Project Paves the
Way to Open Data in
the Cloud

18. How to turn reality into blocks
The technical part.

19. What is Data
Interop?
What is FME?

20. FME Workbench

21. With FME, write Minecraft from:
• GIS: ArcGIS, MapInfo
• CAD: AutoCAD, MicroStation
• BIM: IFC, Revit, SketchUp
• Raster formats
• Point clouds
• Databases: Oracle, MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL &
PostGIS
• XML-based formats: KML, GML, CityGML
• Spreadsheets and tabular formats: Excel, CSV
300+ formats

22. GIS + Rules (CityEngine) to
Minecraft
Andrés Nieto Porras

23. City Engine Results
CGA rules

24. Final Output

25. The path from CityEngine to Minecraft
CityEngine
• Prepares the data for conversion to Minecraft by defining rules
• Exports the model to a 3D format for further work in FME (Esri Data
Interoperability Extension)
Data Interop / FME Workbench
• Creates the transformation to Minecraft

26. BIM to Minecraft
is fun and easy!
Photo: hobbymb via Flickr

27. Output
Input (Revit or IFC)
▪ Map IFC objects to Minecraft block
types
▪ Convert each IFC object to Point
Cloud
▪ Consider scaling depending on use
case
▪ Watch x/y/z position for multiple
building worlds

28. Output
Building Walkthrough

29. DEM + GPS + 3D to
Minecraft
(Easter Island)
Photo: Sarah Twitchell via Flickr

30. 1) Raster DEM
- the island
2) OBJ - statues
Source Data
3) Sharepoint - statue locations

31. Output
 Set world size
 Set blockID
 Set blockData

33. Thinking outside
the cube
Photo: hobbymb via Flickr

34. Linear Network to Minecraft
(Railway)
Source
Vancouver Skytrain
Shapefile

35. Maze Runner Generator
fme.ly/MazeGenerator

36. How to Make
Minecraft Worlds
fme.ly/MinecraftWorlds

37. Thank you!
www.safe.com
dmitri.bagh@safe.com