Converting Minecraft worlds to photorealistic ones using neural networks

Researchers from NVIDIA and Cornell University made GANcraft:

GANcraft aims at solving the world-to-world translation problem. Given a semantically labeled block world such as those from the popular game Minecraft, GANcraft is able to convert it to a new world which shares the same layout but with added photorealism. The new world can then be rendered from arbitrary viewpoints to produce images and videos that are both view-consistent and photorealistic.

This is impressive, but what amazes me more is that Minecraft is still very much a thing after all these years.

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R programming with Minecraft

The new R package miner is an interface to Minecraft via some simple R commands.

The miner package provides just a few simple functions to manipulate the game world: find or move a player’s position; add or remove blocks in the world; send a message to all players in the world. The functions are deliberately simple, designed to be used to build more complex tasks.

I’m thinking walkable data worlds in Minecraft.

I bought Minecraft for my three-year-old, but he didn’t understand the point when his LEGO bricks were within arm’s reach and there weren’t any funny noises or songs. Maybe the purchase wasn’t a total bust after all.

Here’s the full miner package guide.

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Posted by in Coding, Minecraft, R

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Size of Minecraft

I tried playing Minecraft a couple of times but quickly lost interest. Clearly not the case for millions of others. Wired did a bunch of back-of-the-napkin math on how big Minecraft is and put it in an 8-bit video. Find answers to such burning questions such as the volume of the Minecraft world or the time it would take to explore the entire world in real life.

My niece and nephew play the game and its incarnations all the time. I think they even make YouTube videos of them playing. I still don't get it.

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