Question: Have you learnt anything from Minecraft?

Adam Washington answered on 2 Feb 2021:

A few years ago, I was working with a group that studies the scales of the Cyphochilus beetle (I promise this story is about Minecraft). The scales of these beetles are whiter than a sheet of paper, despite being much thinner. We wanted to study how these scales reflect light so well, so we used a process called X-ray nano-tomography. That essentially is using an X-ray camera to take thousands of pictures of a beetle scale from a variety of angles and then use a computer to construct a 3D model of the inside of the scale.

At the end of the process, they gave us the file with the 3D model, which was made of a trillion tiny little cubes, called voxels. When we started exploring the model, all we could do was take a single slice out of it and look at it like a picture. We could make videos by stitching this pictures together, but it was a slow process and we couldn’t really look around inside the scale. I did get to thinking, though, that the world of Minecraft is made of voxels just like our 3D model and the computer that was having so much trouble showing our model could play Minecraft without any issue. We did some research on how Minecraft is able to display its world on the screen, and while we weren’t able to use the same techniques exactly, some similar ideas enabled us to finally look around the scale in real time and understand what kinds of structures were inside.