Thanks to an Environment Ministry initiative, Denmark has become the first country to be fully recreated on a 1:1 scale in Minecraft, a computer game in which users can build and explore a three-dimensional virtual world generated from textured cubes.
DR Nyheder reports that since yesterday those with a licence for the open world game have been able to virtually visit the country in full-size.
The model consists of four trillion cubes and downloading the whole country would take a whole terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) of memory.
Educational value
Simon Kokkendorf and Thorbjørn Nielsen from the geodata agency Geodatastyrelsen constructed the model from publicly available map data, including elevations, streets and buildings.
One of the motivations behind the project was for schools to be able to use the model in social studies and geography classrooms.
“It can also be used in mathematics, in which pupils for example have to build a playground next to the school with a given number of cubes,” Karin Lyngby Kristensen of Ørestad School told DR Nyheder.
