I have some direct experience with 3D datasets of Manhattan; both creating them and working with commercially-available ones. There is NO WAY he isn’t automating the creation of huge swaths of the city. I could see him hand-building major monuments, perhaps by voxelizing Google Warehouse models as a starting point and editing from there.
Still, it’s bizarre that the guy thinks Google, here.com, and Bing are the only datasets out there.
Since Harvard’s free GIS dataset is literally the first google hit for “Manhattan 3D model,” and dozens of other free and paid datasets exist, I have a feeling the reporter misunderstood something.
Then the avatars are taller than average people in real life? I dunno, I haven’t actually played Minecraft, just watched let’s plays and such, and the blocks to me look like they’re closer to 1f^3…
But anyway the unit size of the blocks don’t matter all that much in the calculation. A 277m^2 surface would then be a little more than 16.5 blocks on a side. Also, assuming a height limit of 256 blocks (the current limit according to a friend), the total volume come out to roughly 71,000m^3.
The quoted volume of the map is 71e9m^3. So it looks like whoever wrote the article seems to have misquoted square kilometers as square meters, thus throwing off the actual size of the map by six orders of magnitude. That’s a large difference, even if we’re talking fermi estimations.
