[HN Gopher] Map of all the buildings in the world
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Map of all the buildings in the world
Author : dr_dshiv
Score : 160 points
Date : 2025-12-04 22:43 UTC (6 days ago)
(HTM) web link (gizmodo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gizmodo.com)
| mrec wrote:
| 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?
| dudefeliciano wrote:
| works for me on FF
| matteason wrote:
| You have uBlock Origin or another ad blocker installed, their
| cookie banner disables scrolling but your ad blocker is
| blocking the cookie banner (same thing happened to me)
| LukaD wrote:
| Same here with uBlock on iOS. This happens every now and
| then, not too often. But when it does, I usually decide the
| page is probably not worth reading anyway.
| nirewen wrote:
| For me it was the cookie notice. Had to disable uBlock and
| reject them before the page could be responsive again.
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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
| liotier wrote:
| InfoReseaux remarked that this data is suspicious, to say the
| least: CC BY-NC 4.0 but contains ODbL licensed data coming from
| Openstreetmap - but also from Microsoft.
|
| Thread on the Openstreetmap forum:
| https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/is-globalbuildingatlas...
|
| Christian Quest sent the following message to the authors:
|
| "I'm writing to you because I'm surprised by the choice of data
| license you've set on the GlobalBuildingAtlas dataset.
|
| As mentioned and explained in your paper, at least two data
| sources you've been using to create this dataset are under the
| Open Database License (ODbL): OpenStreetMap and Microsoft
| building datasets.
|
| I've downloaded the extract of data you're proposing to have a
| look at the final dataset, and it confirms that building
| polygons from OSM (and Microsoft) are present in the resulting
| dataset in a substantial portion.
|
| In such case, your dataset must be published under the ODbL
| licence (see 4.2), because it is a derivative database (see 1.0
| of ODbL license for definition).
|
| A copy of this message has also been sent to the Legal Working
| Group of the OSM Foundation.
|
| Thanks in advance to fix quickly the license of the dataset you
| published. This will also allow OpenStreetMap contributors to
| use it to improve OpenStreetMap, which is not possible with the
| CC-BY-NC you choose."
| sl0wik wrote:
| For sure not all buildings. My first query was "Costa del Este,
| Juan Diaz, Distrito de Panama, Panama Province, Panama" and no
| coverage. This region is packed with high rises.
| whackernews wrote:
| Where?
| toss1 wrote:
| Yup, check my home neighborhood and it is good coverage, but
| checked a rural area I know has houses around a lake (not just
| tiny fishing shacks, full-sized 200+m^2 houses) with addresses
| and electrical and telecom/internet service, but there there
| are no buildings shown. Plus, even though there is a lot of
| tree coverage, many of the houses are clearly visible in Google
| Satellite View, so it is unclear why they wouldn't have been
| picked up.
|
| Cool stuff, but they still have work to do.
| fluoridation wrote:
| The reason, I would guess, is that it takes at least a couple
| satellite passes to be able to get the 3D data, and then a
| processing step to actually obtain it, and they've not done
| that for sparsely populated areas.
| aswegs8 wrote:
| Looks like it has trouble depicting the height of the highest
| buildings like Burj Khalifa and Merdeka 118
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| All of the houses on my block are very weird shapes on this map,
| it doesn't reflect reality very well
| macintux wrote:
| I haven't visited the map, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn
| they didn't attempt to re-create the building shapes, just
| location and estimated size. The real shape seems pointless for
| this dataset.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Building shapes are actually pretty accurate in urban areas.
| I haven't read the paper, but I think what they were after is
| building volume. Which obviously requires the footprint shape
| and height
| oersted wrote:
| If it was able to detect roughly how many buildings there are
| in that area, that's already fairly useful at global scale. It
| seems they are focused on measuring urbanization. It's good to
| know though that it may be dodgy at that level of granularity.
| freedomben wrote:
| Indeed, my neighborhood doesn't show any buildings at all even
| though I know all of our houses have been there at least 30
| years and were still there when I left this morning.
| dhosek wrote:
| When you left this morning, sure, but who knows what's
| happened in the interim.
| plaguna wrote:
| 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.
| whackernews wrote:
| I do a similar game when walking around but the complete
| inverse. I live in the UK.
| fluoridation wrote:
| So running directions from B to A while never touching any
| shade, suggesting churches and rehab centers to ignore while
| the shadows stay perfectly still?
| nceheil wrote:
| You can fool me Dracula
| maelito wrote:
| Would need this, inverted, for winter.
| szemy2 wrote:
| Check out sunseekr its popular here in the uk:
| https://sunseekr.com/
| qwertox wrote:
| In that case https://app.shadowmap.org could be a better
| recommendation.
| manoDev wrote:
| It seemed quite accurate for my region (Sao Paulo downtown).
| jabron wrote:
| 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.
| chakintosh wrote:
| I checked the building heights where I live vs the actual
| heights, sometimes they display the height as half of what the
| actual height is.
| fainpul wrote:
| I found a few that are off by a factor of about 4. Always
| lower than in reality, never taller.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Hey maps used to have sea serpents and winged griffins. It's a
| map. Maybe not the best map.
| snowstorm82 wrote:
| Groups of boats in the dock have become buildings. Cool project
| still.
| suyash wrote:
| lol, AI lacking effective QA process it seems
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| If AI says a floating building is a building I will agree with
| it. It isn't wrong but it isn't right.
| wongarsu wrote:
| I'd draw the line at boats that are primarily used when
| docked. A house boat, a restaurant located on a permanently
| docked boat or Russia's floating power plants are all
| buildings in my book
| mengmota wrote:
| oh wow basically amazed
| georgeecollins wrote:
| 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.
| devrundown wrote:
| Would be great to somehow incorporate this into a game where you
| can play in any city in the world.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Google recently has made efforts to link Gemini to Google Earth
| data. "Earth AI"
|
| https://ai.google/earth-ai/
|
| Has anyone tried this? I'm not quite sure how to prompt it
| effectively.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| arxiv:2510.18318
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| The heights seem all over the place. Look at the WTC, for
| example.
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| What is the crowd process to upgrade/correct this? I notice
| massive errors in small Midwest US towns (multiple buildings
| being combined/ommitted, etc)?
| whizzter wrote:
| It's machine-learning generated "slop" honestly.
|
| Looking at where I live and where I grew up the building
| heights are quite badly estimated.
|
| - Some groups of houses around here that are more or less
| identically built but on sloped terrain are reported to have
| widly differing heights
|
| - My neighbour building is reported to be half the height of
| this building (they're more or less equally high at 5 stories)
|
| - A small office shack behind the neighbour building is
| reported to be taller than it (it's a single-story building,
| the neighbour building is 5 stories)
|
| - The freestanding buildings on the farm where I grew up are
| like you said, badly combined, much of the estimation there
| seems to be dependent on shadows,etc.
| f4c39012 wrote:
| Or, they subtracted a digital elevation model from a digital
| surface model, ran a point-in-polygon match against an
| existing building dataset, and labelled the difference as the
| height of the building. No ML needed.
| basscomm wrote:
| There's a notice in the bottom-left corner on desktop that
| says: "This is a machine-learning-derived product. Errors
| may occur"
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Still useful for a sense of building density. If almost
| everything called out is some sort of construction, then the
| density map of the world is a realistic estimate of human
| occupation.
| AStrangeMorrow wrote:
| Yeah some areas I looked at seemed fine (US, EU, Shangahi), but
| some the buildings are on top of the roads, and they look more
| like Perlin Noise than actual buildings. E.g main parts of
| Beijing.
|
| OpenStreetMap and such have pretty good building footprints,
| sometimes enriched with building heights. Maybe that can be
| used for some correction
| cdkmoose wrote:
| Looking around my home area, I found HS football bleachers
| showing up as buildings and an outdoor basketball court showing
| up as a building. Looking at the coloring of those features on
| Google maps, I can see how the mistakes might have been made.
| But still feels like it needs tuning.
|
| To be fair, I checked my boyhood home in very rural Maine and
| it was correct for the size and shape of the multiple farm
| buildings.
| dzink wrote:
| 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.
| sdoering wrote:
| Can confirm. My garage is marked double the height of my actual
| house. Both are incorrect. My shop building on my property,
| next to the garage is actually missing.
|
| The positioning of the shapes in relation to each other are
| also wrong. And not in a subtle way.
|
| Looked at the house my father built in 1985. A few hundred
| kilometers from my current location. The shape is wrong (as are
| the shapes of all neighboring buildings. As are the positions
| toward each other (distance between houses, rotation of
| shapes). The heights are also significantly wrong. The two
| story houses on the opposite side of the road are said to be
| slightly above 2 meters in height.
| d_silin wrote:
| quite a lot of height errors, checked my neighborhood as well,
| often by orders of magnitude off.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| > 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/
| jspann wrote:
| 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...
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Revealing: third-world areas look different. Curiously, Australia
| resembles third-world building density more than it resembles the
| industrialized world.
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(page generated 2025-12-10 23:01 UTC)