Ordinance Survey have jumped on the hype of the new Minecraft movie and have made a number of counties across the UK playable on the game. You can now explore Cardiff or Eryri from the comfort of your own home.
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00:00Gaming has been one of the fastest growing industries in the world over the last few
00:05decades, with games like Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft captivating young people who
00:10have spent millions of hours collectively playing their favourite games. Despite concerns
00:14that kids are spending too much time online, some games do have a bit more to them and
00:18are even being used in schools as an educational tool. Minecraft is at the fore of this, with
00:22a version built specifically for education, and the game itself giving people, young and
00:27old, a chance to put 100% creativity into building their very own worlds. Ordnance Survey though,
00:33the classic map makers of the UK, have decided to take their expertise online and have put
00:38a little bit of OS into the world of Minecraft. Yeah sure, so as you mentioned the Minecraft
00:43movie is coming out, so we were inspired to take this challenge on when we heard the movie
00:47was coming out. We thought it would be quite a good time to talk about it with a lot of
00:50buzz and hype around Minecraft. And then as we'd created a version of Great Britain on
00:56Minecraft before, 11 years ago, we thought it'd be worth trying it again. So we would use our open
01:02data which has developed and improved a lot in that time in those 11 years. And also Minecraft
01:06itself has had lots of updates in that time. So basically yeah, we wanted to take something that
01:10we'd done before and see how it looks now. And yeah, we're absolutely, we're so happy with the results.
01:16There are a number of examples of huge Minecraft project. For example, there's a full map of Denmark
01:21available to play and the Ordnance Survey have created a full map of the UK before in the past,
01:25but they wanted to make it more accessible and give people the chance to explore their own hometowns
01:30with Cardiff and Gwynedd, some of the areas available to download.
01:34The point of all this is we wanted to make it downloadable and playable so people can actually
01:38interact with the real world around them. But yeah, 100 gigabytes is quite a big ask for people to
01:43download and host on their own computers. So what we then did is broke it down into counties. So I think
01:48it's 92 counties in Great Britain. And what we're currently doing is we're going to offer 16 different
01:53areas that people can go around and explore. So they can go on our website and download them for free,
01:59put them into the game and then load up and then explore certain counties around Great Britain. I
02:03think it's, yeah, it's really fantastic. Being able to explore the real life Cardiff in a virtual
02:07world is a surreal experience. And Robert says it's a great opportunity to let people explore the beauty
02:12of their towns in a new way. So the buildings are represented by the brick blocks.
02:17And then it's, you're able to get some really beautiful like bird's eye views where you can
02:21see the different roads and the routes. You can walk along like the rivers and that kind of thing.
02:25And yeah, it is, it's definitely a mixture of urban and rural.
02:29It's not just about exploring though, as you can also create whatever you'd like right in the centre
02:34of Cardiff and at the top of Urwyðfa in Gwynedd.
02:37That's the brilliant thing about Minecraft is just limitless creativity. So really, once we've handed this
02:42base map over to people, what they want to do with it is entirely up to them. So
02:45people could, yeah, they could rebuild Cardiff if they wanted to. They could put a roller coaster
02:50in Cardiff if they wanted to. They could plant more forests. They could build their own railway network.
02:56It's, it's really up to them.