alt Hacker NewsMap of all the buildings in the world
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So here is finally the data that I needed for my idea: walk directions from A to B while never leaving the shadows, suggesting bars and pubs where to wait while the shadows catch up and let you cross “safely” where before was sunny.
Useful for scorching weather places like south of Spain.
The height measure when you click on a building is not very accurate. Clicked on two next to each other (one single floor and one with two floors) and the single story house was marked taller by the site.
I've had a project idea in the back of my mind for a long time: take all of my locations that I've saved in Swarm (https://swarmapp.com) and 3D render all of the buildings that I've been to. The issue was a lack of models of the actual buildings - which is here! Maybe it is possible...
> This is a huge leap from the previous global dataset, which contained about 1.7 billion buildings
I use the monthly release of Overture Maps building dataset and the last one had around 2.3 billion buildings iirc
[1] https://docs.overturemaps.org/blog/2025/11/19/release-notes/
Google recently has made efforts to link Gemini to Google Earth data. “Earth AI”
Has anyone tried this? I’m not quite sure how to prompt it effectively.
What is the crowd process to upgrade/correct this? I notice massive errors in small Midwest US towns (multiple buildings being combined/ommitted, etc)?
They've used a vision transformer to estimate building heights from monocular aerial photographs, so they're guesses at best. Calling this a map is a stretch.
At least in Firefox, this page doesn't scroll at all. No scrollbar, scroll wheel/cursor keys/PageDown all do nothing.
How does someone screw up CSS so completely?
Groups of boats in the dock have become buildings. Cool project still.
Revealing: third-world areas look different. Curiously, Australia resembles third-world building density more than it resembles the industrialized world.
For sure not all buildings. My first query was "Costa del Este, Juan Díaz, Distrito de Panamá, Panamá Province, Panama" and no coverage. This region is packed with high rises.
I wonder when people will be able to make a map of all the people in the world at a particular moment. Pretty soon I think.
Would be great to somehow incorporate this into a game where you can play in any city in the world.
All of the houses on my block are very weird shapes on this map, it doesn't reflect reality very well
Looks like it has trouble depicting the height of the highest buildings like Burj Khalifa and Merdeka 118
It seemed quite accurate for my region (São Paulo downtown).
The heights seem all over the place. Look at the WTC, for example.
oh wow basically amazed
Github: https://github.com/zhu-xlab/GlobalBuildingAtlas
Viewer: https://tubvsig-so2sat-vm1.srv.mwn.de/ (might already be hugged to death? When it works you get a heatmap when zoomed out, and 3d models with flat roofs when you zoom in far enough)
Looks pretty cool. Obviously only covers above-ground buildings or above-ground portions of buildings. Also seems like it tends to view buildings built wall-to-wall next to each other as the same building, but not always. So if you calculate something like average building volume you are bound to be off quite a bit