LIDARcraft - boxes are cool

A person represented as point cloud data, seen via minecraft
Open3d visualisation of lidar data
An overview of the setting of the car, with lidar data displayed as minecraft blocks
The view from the top of the autonomous vehicle's lidar scanner
One of our teammates saluting the camera
our workstation, scanned with an iphone and then processed by our system. Not the whiteboard, people, laptops and table
Another angle of our workstation

Inspiration

Global climate change has already had observable effects on the environment. Glaciers have shrunk, ice on rivers and lakes is breaking up earlier, plant and animal ranges have shifted and trees are flowering sooner. Effects that scientists had predicted in the past would result from global climate change are now occurring: loss of sea ice, accelerated sea-level rise and longer, more intense heat waves. In this very crucial historical moment, we all have to play our role, this was what made us make LIDARcraft (formerly known as minecraft)

What it does

It's a stupendous Minecraft map generator based on LiDAR data. Wanna have a house in Minecraft just like your own house? No problem. Wanna have a gigantic statue of yourself in your own server to be worshipped and praised? Leave that to us. Wanna a detailed model of your university building in Minecraft? Actually, that takes a while to scan but the sky is the limit (actually, the z-axis limit is 255 blocks, but you get the point)

How we built it

Python go brrr... (but seriously we built parsers for point cloud data, using python and open3d to process data at the point level (computing colours and geometry from the available data). We then used open3d techniques to voxelize the data, before parsing it again to command minecraft to input individual coloured blocks in a certain area). Lots of wrong avenues were explored too along the way :-)

Challenges we ran into

We missed bubble tea
Mad overslept in the morning
I wanted to kill myself because array cropping didn't work
We initially wanted to revolutionise the field of ML for point clouds and discovered it was hard
Github broke at about the same time as our sanity

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I made a gigantic statue of myself in Minecraft only in 24 hours. I don't know what can be more glorious in the world

What we learned

French people do not sleep at night
Vegetarian pizza is not that bad
You can teleport yourself in Minecraft using: /tp

What's next for LIDARcraft

Right now we are thinking about scanning the whole New York and building our GTA-Minecraft game, but who knows.

Brainstormed ideas for LIDAR tech we came up with at the start of the project (when we were young and free) include:

Checking two point clouds for differences, with the purpose of maintaining the security of a room.
Creating obstacle maps of a building that get transmitted to a robot when it enters the building, thereby giving it a layout of the place and enabling it to manoeuvre more easily (we even got around to writing a path-planning algorithm)