Show HN: Warsaw in voxels – An interactive 3D map of the city centre | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Warsaw in voxels – An interactive 3D map of the city centre

p.migdal.pl

324 pointsstared54 comments

Explore central Warsaw in voxels - slightly inspired by Minecraft, and MagicaVoxel. You can change the date, time of day and weather, explore the city, or click on a pedestrian to control them (here a bit of inspiration from Dungeon Keeper).

Works best on desktop, but I tried to make it usable on mobile too. The initial load can take a while. It's based on several open datasets, including:

- OpenStreetMap (https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=6/52.02/19.14) - buildings, streets, sidewalks, tram tracks, etc

- GUGiK / Geoportal (https://www.geoportal.gov.pl/) - LiDAR for building heights and trees, aerial imagery for colours

- Warsaw's city tree database (https://mapa.um.warszawa.pl/) - individual tree species, used for seasonal foliage

Open-source (https://github.com/stared/warsaw-vibe-voxel), so feel invited to (re)use it as you wish!

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There are quite a few such other projects, e.g. Streets of Prague (https://beta.streetsofprague.com/), were one can explore Prague in a top-down GTA2-like mode, based on real data.

this blew my mind! incredible!

It'd be cool to see these taken to the next level by showing actual live updated public transit and car traffic

there's an ex googler whos been pretending on yt for the last 6 months that he's building "open source palantir".

he recently published his ai slop and it's basically a google earth running on open source maps with fake traffic drawn on the streets.

looks impressive, until you zoom on your location and look out the window and compare what's on the screen vs real life

Until you realize its streaming data and by zooming in to compare your location you just gave that dude your precise location.

Gamepad controls are broken in the car for some reason. Otherwise cool stuff )

What a cool project. Without any knowledge on the mentioned datasets: how generic is the approach you used for building the voxel world? Can this be applied to other cities as well?

Does this bring us a step closer to a fully virtual Minecraft world?!

Super neat project but I am getting fractional (<1 FPS) frame rates in FF on Linux. Granted, this is an older AMD PC and certainly no power house but it used to run actual Minecraft just fine.

Sounds like software rendering.

Try activating webgl/webgpu (off by default on linux) in FF config (or use chromium).

Same here, FF on Linux notebook with only an iGPU on an intel ultra 7.

I really enjoyed visiting Warsaw, I went there for work a few years ago and didn't really know what to expect.

If you ever have the chance, I highly recommend the Warsaw Uprising Museum.

It's almost unusably slow on my laptop. 3080ti mobile, windows 11, chrome. I opened the profiler and the update appears to be fast enough; roughly hitting 30fps, but there are massive gaps between updates and the actual frame time seems to be about 120ms.

Other than that, neat :)

Made a few perf changes - let me know if now it is better.

Nice. At first glance looks cool, but then, oh my, some areas are really butchered :S Poor Old Town and Plac Zamkowy - I'm familiar with the area and at first was scanning trying to find it visually by the features I know are there, but then in this model it's very different (wrong color, many more floors in this model, a 20-story building where at most should be at most a 5-story, the old town castle looking like a gray residential 'blok' and not the prettier structure that it is!).

I think you're looking at something else, because the Old Town isn't on the map at all. Unless part of it failed to load for me.

Yeah that was the first thing I looked for. I find it fascinating that the old town was rebuilt exactly as it was before, after the war. Especially because at that time Poland was under communist rule who usually didn't really care for such 'inefficient' aesthetics.

The rebuilt was motivated by preserving architecture important for national identity (which was something Polish communist authorities did buy into), not aesthetics.

By popular demand, added it now.

Looks great! Sad that could not find that my favourite thing from warsaw trip, this really long residential building that had actually its own wikipedia article and was called "dachshund" :D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachshund_(building)

The map cuts off just a few hundred meters to the west of that building.

Mobile version reloads, imho it is too heavy for Safari.

Well done.

As default weather - I would prefer sunny day instead of rain…

Yeah, it is a bit heavy, but I had to balance features and performance without adding too many toggles that push choices onto the user (often when it is already too late). I optimized it primarily for desktop, with some ideas for making it lighter on phones (rendering only small parts in 1m3 voxels and the rest in gray 8m3 blocks).

When it comes to weather, I am torn between always using golden hour with a clear sky and using the current weather.

>As default weather - I would prefer sunny day instead of rain…

But then it would not be an authentic Warsaw experience!

Wow such amazing work! I love it.

I have good memories of my visits to Warsaw. Very walkable city so I spent a lot of time doing that (despite being there on tiresome work trips).

This runs 10x too slow for what it is. Tell Opus about mip mapping, greedy meshing, maybe even zbuffering judging on how bad this runs.

Told Opus - tell me if it is any better.

Cant detect any improvement by eye. Lags when dragging, runs at ~15fps maxing GPU.

Does it run smoothly for you? What kind of hardware?

This is neat but the FPS controls are very strange, I'd recommend changing the A/D movement to be a 'strafe' (lateral movement, no rotation) and reversing the mouse look directions (i.e. dragging right should rotate the camera to the right instead of dragging the screen like it might in figma)

A bit unfortunate it doesn't reach to the Old Town, or even Royal Palace. But impressive stuff nonetheless!

Good point! I've already expanded the area from something much smaller (so to go to the National Stadium and so on). The first draft is easy, since Opus 5.5 is good at working with open data and checking against it.

What takes much more time is polishing. Sometimes things are jagged or wrong, streets are disconnected, some tree crowns float in the air, and bridges look like they’ve been hit by an airstrike.

I check things manually, compare them with photos, etc.

The seasonal trees from the city database are a great touch. The buildings reminded me a bit of 3DCityDB. Did you look at CityGML or 3DCityDB at all, or go straight from OSM and LiDAR?

The voxel version of Złota 44 doesn't do it justice. I mean, just look at this thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z%C5%82ota_44

Thanks! I will look at it.

It is all about fixing such stuff.

I really like this, not trying to be annoying but is the main point that we can walk around in first person or does it lend itself to be ported to minecraft or something?

Sorry to be weird and ask. Very impressive though I like it.

A very natural question.

Not a Minecraft player myself, but if you want to do so (code is there), feel more than invited.

For the longest time I wanted this as the interface for a Local News website I was participating in. It was impossible at the time but I hope it will become a thing. Sure beats HTML tables with text and pictures.

> Sure beats HTML tables with text and pictures

Except this website chokes many desktop PCs, not to mention phones.

This is one of the most amazing things I’ve seen. Spent a ton of time wandering around. Thank you for making this!

I really like that you can click on people and cars jumping from one to another to see follow along behind them - nice!

A fragment of Śródmieście (the downtown center of Warsaw). The Old Town and most of the right bank (including Praga) are missing.

In any case, very fun. Hope it improves.

Awesome! I gave your git repo to Opus and asked to recreate my hometown.

Looking good so far, even without lidar data yet.

Really impressive. The autumn trees and the golden hour light make it feel alive, and the landmark labels are a nice touch. Fun to fly around the city centre.

My Lenovo laptop sounds like a jet engine taking off, but the website is great!

It was raining when I opened it. Is that tied to the live weather?

It's really good, and responsive in Firefox on my android tablet.

Is it raining, or are those rendering artifacts on a fractional scale monitor?

edit: it is raining!

Yes it's raining, you can change the weather on top-left of the website

It's raining, man :)

Unusable because of (lack of) performance. I have a laptop with a dedicated GPU...

small part of Downtown.. looks cool but instantly one wants more, especially if you know what this city can offer today and how rapidly it's changing its landscape!

this is cool, but not to be pedantic, voxels are usually way smaller. 1cm-10cm, these look like 1m.

AFAIK voxels are 3d pixels - of any size.

wow thats super cool! does it correctly texture the buildings?

just a black screen for me with some labels floating in space

Made a few changes. Did you try to hard-reload?

Also, which system, GPU and browser?

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