Loikaw 3D

Walk, cycle, ride a motorbike or fly around Loikaw (လွိုင်ကော်), Kayah State, Myanmar, in your browser.

Play: https://heinhtetlinnnyan.github.io/loikaw-3d/

Controls

W A S D / arrows	move (bicycle and motorbike: W go, S brake, A/D steer)
mouse	look (click the scene to capture the mouse)
Shift	run / pedal harder / open the throttle / fly faster
Space	jump (walk) · climb (fly)
C	descend (fly)
1 2 3 4	walk · bicycle · motorbike · fly
F	take off / land on the bicycle or motorbike (then Space/C or look up/down to climb)
L	Thadingyut festival lights on/off (on by default during the festival)
T	let time run (one hour every 30 seconds) · [ ] an hour back/forward
M	bigger map; click the map to jump there

On a phone: joystick bottom-left, drag anywhere to look.

Where the data comes from

• Streets, rivers, lakes, named places, ~240 buildings: OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL.
• ~23,000 more building outlines: Microsoft Global ML Building Footprints, traced from satellite imagery, ODbL. These have no height information, so heights are estimated (mostly one or two storeys).
• Terrain: Mapzen / AWS Terrain Tiles (SRTM-based, ~30 m).

Hand-made models, placed at their real locations and shaped after photos on Wikimedia Commons (Category:Loikaw); the shapes are approximations, not surveys:

• Taung Kwe Pagoda (19.6675° N, 97.2081° E): the flat-topped crag, main stupa, smaller stupas and the lift tower with its tiered roof.

• Myo Nan Pagoda / မြို့နာမ်စေတီ (19.6778° N, 97.2113° E): a walled white courtyard with a large gilded pagoda on stepped terraces, green-roofed shrines and an entrance pavilion, laid out from an aerial view described by a former resident.

• ရှမ်းပိုင်းတံတား (ဂျပန်တံတား) (19.6688° N, 97.2145° E): a steel truss on the western span of NH21 over the Balu Chaung, with a deck you can walk and ride across.

• သီရိမင်္ဂလာဈေး (Thiri Mingalar Market): the halls inside the OpenStreetMap market area get rows of low blue gable roofs, as in current satellite views.

• Clock Tower / နာရီစင် (19.6772° N, 97.2120° E): the striped tower on its roundabout. Its clock shows the game's time. This is where you start.

• ဝိုင်းဘို အိမ်, and a short lane nearby with golden paving, candles on both sides and paper lanterns overhead, lit every night: a street with a lot of history for the person this map was made for.

• Old home / အိမ်ဟောင်း: laid out from its aerial view. The gateway opens off the road to the north through a grey block wall, a red-earth driveway runs south between the houses, and the single-storey house with a low grey tin roof stands just east of it, among big shady trees. Lights at the gate and porch every night.

• BEHS No. 1 / အထက ၁: laid out from its aerial view: long one-storey classroom blocks with low gabled tin roofs in rust, grey, green and blue-grey, a white wall and gate on the road, a paved front yard and a walkway running north between the blocks.

• အထက ၇ (formerly အလက ၄) and အထက ၅ (formerly အလက ၁): classroom blocks with low gabled roofs in the colours of their aerial views, playing fields, yards and walls along the roads.

Buildings get painted facades (plaster houses, shophouses along the main roads, teak houses, concrete blocks) and hipped tin roofs in the blue, green, red and grey seen around town. These are typical styles, not the real look of each building.

Town texture: compared against aerial views, the town gets about 25,000 shady trees around houses and over the fields, forest on the hills where nobody has built (about 50,000 low-poly crowns), dusty bare ground where houses cluster, a ~46 m wide Balu Chaung, and pale concrete and dirt roads. Trees are placed by rules, not traced from imagery.

Thadingyut: paper lanterns and candles along the main route (Myo Nan → clock tower → ရှမ်းပိုင်းတံတား → သီရိမင်္ဂလာဈေး), strings of lights and candles at the pagodas and clock tower, and candles at a few homes, under a full moon.

Satellite imagery and OSM edits come from different years, so some buildings may no longer stand, or may be missing.

Make it better

The best way to improve this map is to improve OpenStreetMap: add buildings, names, pagodas, schools and building:levels tags around Loikaw at openstreetmap.org, then rebuild the data.

Rebuilding the data

tools/build_data.py turns raw downloads into data/loikaw.json. It needs Python with numpy and pillow, and a folder containing:

• osm.json: an Overpass API result (out geom tags) for ways tagged building, highway, waterway, natural=water, landuse, leisure, plus named nodes, in bbox 19.63,97.17,19.72,97.25
• ms_bbox.json: Microsoft footprints for quadkey 132201032, filtered to the bbox
• terr/X_Y.png: Terrarium tiles at zoom 14, x 12614–12617, y 7276–7280

python tools/build_data.py path/to/downloads data/loikaw.json

Serve the folder with any static server (python -m http.server) and open it.

Built with three.js.