I played with a dataset like this from OpenStreetMap, and other Geographic Information Systems data (did you know the US government makes freely available 10 meter resolution heightmaps of the entire continental United States? And in some places better?). It was a lot of fun, and a mild bit unsettling, looking at this publicly available data, and tracking down childhood homes in backwoods communities and seeing very accurate footprints of houses.
The GIS community has built absolute metric craploads of tooling to work with all this data and play with it. Check out https://www.gdal.org/ if you are interesting, and QGIS [https://qgis.org/en/site/] for an open source data viewer.
I used all this support and data to build a silly script to take in that heightmap data and turn it into a 3D model that could be imported into Blender (or other software). I'm currently "stuck" at trying to overlay freely available road data over that terrain.
Some data-sets are available as "databases" that you can hook QGIS (or similar software) to directly. No need to download the whole thing, it'll stream only what's required in your viewport.
I recently heard about a short story by a French author about a map making-obsessed country who covered their whole country with a 1:1 scale map. For years I've had the idea for an indie game about trying make it from one side of the USA to the other with a crappy car and little money - basically a modern-day reimagining of Oregon Trail. However a challenge would be rendering interesting buildings and cities. So something I thought about is what if the game also uses the idea of the whole country having a 1:1 street atlas map draped over everything? You could give hints of there being buildings and other interesting things peeking through rips in the map, while most of the modeling / graphics is really just open street map data textured over a height map.
The image to me looks like mold growth, which made me think about whether or not there are any parallels between human infrastructure growth and bacterial/fungal colony growth.
Interesting converse idea would be a map of everywhere on earth essentially untouched by humans. Places with virtually no buildings, farms, roads, human-made trails, or any other modern human development.
Obviously humanity has left its mark on just about every corner of the world, but a map of the shrinking relatively untouched areas would be neat.
I'm always interested in what exists in this kind of dataset. Near me, they have my neighbor's stables and garage, and the covered picnic tables behind my church.... but have neither of my barns which have been here since the 70s, and are about 3 years behind on the homes being built.
This really puts the environmental impact of humanity into perspective for me. Not including secondary or tertiary effects, look at how much of the world that humans have physically, immediately touched! And to put this map even more into perspective, the US isn't even close to being the most densely populated. Imagine what the the maps of China, India, and the EU look like!
Buildings are only a small fraction of humanity's impact on the world.
A lot of land that isn't built up (and therefore doens't show up on the NYT map) is used for farming. After all, we have seven billion mouths to feed.
Most forests that aren't used for farming have probably been clear-cut a number of times already, and are still being managed artificially. We need timber for the buildings.
There are forests in Europe that appear peaceful until you realize that the reason nobody goes in there is that the ground is chock full of unexploded shells from two world wars.
And in case you find a desert where nothing useful can grow, you might want to check if we've detonated a couple of nukes there.
That's a super cool dataset. It does drive the more philosophical question of "what constitutes a building" though.
Looking at the map, it seems that large liquid storage tanks count as buildings, but pipelines do not. Other large industrial facilities (e.g. distillation towers) seem to be hit-or-miss. Docks and other offshore platforms seem to be missing although it wouldn't surprise me if there are intellectual property or security issues around some of these things.
Edit: The statue of liberty counts as a building, but the map seems a little bit confused about various Washington DC monuments.
Edit2: Amphitheaters seem hit-or-miss. Playground structures and pools seem to be out.
I played with a dataset like this from OpenStreetMap, and other Geographic Information Systems data (did you know the US government makes freely available 10 meter resolution heightmaps of the entire continental United States? And in some places better?). It was a lot of fun, and a mild bit unsettling, looking at this publicly available data, and tracking down childhood homes in backwoods communities and seeing very accurate footprints of houses.
The GIS community has built absolute metric craploads of tooling to work with all this data and play with it. Check out https://www.gdal.org/ if you are interesting, and QGIS [https://qgis.org/en/site/] for an open source data viewer.
I used all this support and data to build a silly script to take in that heightmap data and turn it into a 3D model that could be imported into Blender (or other software). I'm currently "stuck" at trying to overlay freely available road data over that terrain.