Show HN: Text to 3D simulation on a map (does history pretty well)
51 comments
·May 20, 2025taneq
I asked for a large asteroid impacting the Pacific ocean. Interestingly the resultant tidal wave apparently heads directly to Honolulu, then to Terminal Island, then reverses course and visits Sydney before traveling overland through New South Wales and Queensland, causing some earthquakes in Papua New Guinea, and coming to rest in Tokyo Harbour.
Also I just realised I can talk to the asteroid. It understandably seems a little traumatized.
me: Hi! What brings you to this particular part of the ocean?
asteroid: *hurtling through the atmosphere at tremendous speed, trailing
fire* AAARRRRRGGGHHHHH! NOT BY CHOICE! Gravity's got me in its grip!
Been floating peacefully through space for millions of years until your
planet's pull caught me! CAN'T STOP NOW! *glowing brighter* Ocean impact
in approximately 17 seconds! Nothing personal against this particular
patch of water! BRACE FOR TSUNAMI! *increasing in brightness and
velocity*
walthamstow
Couldn't help but start humming Queen's Don't Stop Me Now after reading what the asteroid said
lukehollis
This is the best thing that anyone has simulated yet hahah
pedalpete
We used to do 3D virtual world work, and though I like where you're going with this, I think loading hi-res tiles, for your use-case, is not the right approach.
The direction we were trying to move with https://ayvri.com back in 2018 was to model the world from low-res imagery, and render higher-resolution views. At the time, the AI tech wasn't ready, but I think you can do this now. You don't need a prefect replica of the world, you want a convincing replica, so when you're drawing Tokyo, the architecture and elements in the scene match what would be expected.
lukehollis
Ayvri is impressive, and thanks for the feedback - I hear what you're saying about the convincing replica
mkbehbehani
Cool idea, can only use 2D at the moment. Looks like the 3D tile quota is exhausted: "message": "Quota exceeded for quota metric '3D Tiles root requests' and limit '3D Tiles root requests per day' of service 'tile.googleapis.com' for consumer 'project_number:1016378558728'."
https://tile.googleapis.com/v1/3dtiles/root.json?key=AIzaSyB...
lukehollis
Asking for a quota increase with support! Will build in bring-your-own-key
mkbehbehani
Random thing worth I ran into once, you may have already handled this but sharing just in case:
May want to confirm the map renderer is making its requests using the URL with both the session and API key instead of only the API key. If your API requests are base key only, every refresh client-side might be unexpectedly consuming one of your root quota units, rather than each user getting a session of unlimited tile loads for 3 hours. If you're seeing network traffic in the console from your renderer out to the API without the session token in the query string along with the API token, or if you see the session token is totally different after refreshing, that might be a sign of something wonky causing quota depletion.
Example URL for a tile fetch with both params:
https://tile.googleapis.com/v1/3dtiles/datasets/CgA/files/UlRPVEYuYnVs.json?session=SESSION_TOKEN&key=YOUR_API_KEY
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/tile/create-renderer#requests-and-responses
lukehollis
Okay back online in 3d too!
rafram
I don't totally understand this, but it has the potential to be very, very cool.
(The satellite imagery doesn't work in Firefox. Just clouds.)
dr_dshiv
If this was just a post about generated clouds I would have upvoted anyway. They were cool. Love the vision!
lukehollis
Sorry, exhausted quota on the 3d tiles from Google Maps Platform -- should have workaround up shortly
spuz
The map imagery doesn't seem to work in Edge either.
tomaytotomato
This might be being unfair, but I asked it to simulate the Battle of Goose Green, during the Falklands war of 1982.
Its just a blank screen - https://mused.com/map/sim/2993/battle-of-goose-green
I am excited to see it working though!
yreg
The sim on your link is not blank anymore. I can see a map, some entities and some simple paths they take.
solardev
I don't understand what it's supposed to do. I see clouds and a prompt entry. I type something in and it just gives me a text response about New York urban tourism...?
caseyy
I think it's a 3D visualization of Earth with simulated clouds. You can ask an AI to generate a GIS layer to visualize an event. Then, you can talk to parts of the event in chat.
lukehollis
Here's a video -- the 3d map tiles quota was hit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXS9sNcDLJU
Should be back shortly!
solardev
Ah, thanks, that video looks pretty cool!
don-bright
Dating myself, typed in "Global Thermonuclear War". Watching various cities of the world have their map flash on the screen for a few seconds at a time was certainly nightmare inducing. But fascinating.
mdrzn
Seems very interesting tho. Maybe pre-generate the three "prompts" that you show when I open the page, and load them from cache when I select them? At least I can see how it should work.
edit: in 2d the map loads, in 3d it doesn't load. But when it works in 2d it's VERY COOL!
Here's my example: https://mused.com/map/sim/3129/roman-civil-wars-of-the-1st-c...
moontear
Doesn't work in Chrome (no map), doesn't work in Firefox. This sounds really interesting and I would love a video of it working its magic.
meindnoch
I don't know what this is supposed to do, but it doesn't seem to work.
lukehollis
Sorry, hit a quota on the 3d map tiles - here's video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXS9sNcDLJU
And requested increase, should be back soon!
conception
This is magic. I just did volcano and it simulated lava flow, emergency responders, blast zones. Pretty cool stuff.
lukehollis
Thanks!
ElijahLynn
Prompt box does not show on mobile. I'm using brave on Android. Even when I request the desktop site it does not show it. But when I use brave on Mac it does show it.
This was a confusing landing for me on a mobile device.
lukehollis
Thanks, this should be updated for a better landing on mobile
Simulate anything on a map from a text prompt -- and conduct risk analysis against LiveUA map's global realtime data points from social media and news sources. I trained a GPT-2-size model on historical incident data used to predict things that will go wrong.
As historian Benjamin Breen mentions, the leading language models are good historians, so the application will simulate historical events pretty well also.
I include a Multi-Agent RL Urban Mobility model in progress displayed on the map as small white cubes representing traffic and pedestrians. Around SF, it uses real census data and other sources for semantically meaningful day plans, etc. It will populate where you move the map, albeit a little slowly. This is based on previous work on my GitHub--I hope to connect it to Unreal's city samples project soon.
The simulations are pretty simple so far but will grow in complexity soon.
I won the AGI House World Models Hackathon with this and the MARL model.
Many thanks to Shota Matsuda and Garrett Johnson for the cloud and atmospheric effects libraries on Github at takram-design-engineering/three-geospatial
Glad for feedback, and thanks for trying it out!