Riga in voxels

Central Riga as an interactive 3D map, one metre per block.

Open the map at riga.memplant.com. It works best on a laptop; phones and tablets get a lighter version without shadows and effects.

The map covers the Old Town, the Central Market, the Daugava and its bridges, the Esplanade and the Freedom Monument, the Moscow district up to the Academy of Sciences, and the National Library across the river. You can change the date, the hour, the weather and the river level, or walk the streets.

Built on Warsaw in voxels

Riga in voxels is a fork of Warsaw in voxels by Piotr Migdał. The viewer, the voxel pipeline, the lighting, the weather and the street life are all his work, published as open source under the MIT licence at github.com/stared/warsaw-vibe-voxel. We replaced the Warsaw data with Riga's and added a converter for the Latvian LiDAR. Thank you, Piotr.

Where the data comes from

• Building heights, roofs, terrain, water and bridges: aerial laser scanning (LiDAR) point clouds from the Latvian Geospatial Information Agency (LĢIA), open data under CC0 1.0 via data.gov.lv. The scan is from around 2016.
• Roof and ground colours: the LĢIA colour orthophoto, 6th cycle (2016-2018), CC0 1.0.
• Streets, footprints, materials, tram lines, trees and street furniture: © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database License, via the Geofabrik extract for Latvia.
• Place names and which places to label: Wikidata (CC0) and Wikipedia page view statistics from the Wikimedia REST API.
• Typical weather by day of the year: Open-Meteo historical weather (CC BY 4.0), based on the Copernicus ERA5 reanalysis.
• When the trees turn green and change colour: phenology observations from the Deutscher Wetterdienst and iNaturalist, as used in the original project.
• 3D rendering: three.js, N8AO and postprocessing, all MIT licensed.

What to expect

The LiDAR is about ten years old. Buildings put up since then appear only if OpenStreetMap has their outline. No landmark is modelled by hand yet, so spires are only as sharp as the laser scan caught them. Windows are drawn by a shader, not from real window positions.

Independent project

Riga in voxels is not affiliated with or endorsed by LĢIA, the City of Riga or Piotr Migdał. A mention here is a credit, not an endorsement.