Show HN: Warsaw in voxels – An interactive 3D map of the city centre
- ID
- 42293
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 03 Nov 2026, 12:25 AM
- Fetched
- 03 Nov 2026, 9:50 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://p.migdal.pl/warsaw-vibe-voxel/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 5.5
- Created
- 03 Nov 2026, 9:50 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_coders
What happened
A Show HN project renders central Warsaw as an interactive voxel map, styled after Minecraft and MagicaVoxel, with controls for date, time of day, weather, and the ability to click a pedestrian and take control of them (an idea borrowed from Dungeon Keeper). It is assembled from open datasets: OpenStreetMap for buildings, streets, sidewalks and tram tracks; GUGiK/Geoportal LiDAR for building heights and trees plus aerial imagery for colours; and Warsaw's city tree database for per-species seasonal foliage. The code is open source on GitHub, desktop-first with mobile effort, and the author warns the initial load can take a while; the thread drew 206 points and 35 comments.
Why it matters
The transferable part is the data stack, not the voxels: heights from LiDAR, colour from aerial imagery, species from a municipal tree register. If you want a KL or Penang equivalent, verify up front whether the local equivalents (building footprints, LiDAR-derived heights, a tree inventory) actually exist and are licensed for reuse, because the author's own note that initial load is slow shows how heavy raw city geometry gets when you ship it to a browser. Decide whether your project is a rendering demo or a data-pipeline demo, and budget accordingly.
Discussion angle
Which layer is the real bottleneck for a Malaysian version: OSM building coverage, LiDAR-derived heights, or a municipal tree/props dataset? Worth checking one local area live during the call to see what the data actually supports before anyone promises a demo.