Thunderhead Explorer

So in this short post I am integrating 4 things that I love the most - GIS, Hadoop, BigMemory and Minecraft - The idea is the following, I would like to visualize in Minecraft the result of Kernel Density calculation performed by Hadoop.  The job output is placed into distributed memory rather than back into HDFS in such that a Minecraft server can read that memory and populate a world that I have teleported into. Here is a short video that showcases the last steps after I started the BigMemory server and ran the Hadoop Job. Like usual all the source code is available here .

At this year's User Conference , I presented in the Esri Labs booth "The Gamification of GIS", where I showcased how a Minecraft  player can teleport and interact with GIS worlds. It was a simple proof of concept, but I believe the ramification can be significant, especially after listening to Amber Case talking about STEM in the plenary. My boys and their friends can play  Minecraft  for hours. They build collaboratively amazing online worlds and pixel art . And despite the "blockiness" of the worlds and the art, the game is pretty immersive. One day my son tells me "Hey dad, I think I can build one of your worlds in Minecraft". What he meant about my world is a GIS world that I render using ArcMap . So I started thinking about this and wondered if I too can do this, but programmatically. A bit of googling, and found out that I can program the Minecraft server using Java .  My boys play Minecraft on their XBox and have a desktop version too. T...