Mineable Minecraft Block

At Hack A Day, we’re pretty big Minecraft fans so you can imagine our interest when we saw [Ben Purdy]’s real-life Minecraft block. The build uses a projector system to display a block onto a cardboard box and reacts to being ‘mined’ just like in the game.

Block animation is handled by a piezo sensor, an Arduino and a Processing sketch. From earlier posts on [Ben’s] blog, we’re going to guess that he used the keystone video projection library his own solution to map the Minecraft block onto the cardboard box. Animation is handled just as in Minecraft – overlaying the breaking animation onto the block and adding some particle effects.

We’ve seen a few Minecraft hacks before, like using it as a 3D design tool, and connecting your redstone CPU to the outside world. [Ben]’s build follows in the tradition of its forebears and is something we really want to try out. Check out the demos after the break.


[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/28096608]

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/28098003]

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/28124800]

15 thoughts on “Mineable Minecraft Block

  1. Wow, I’m honored to be featured on here! Love your site.

    Just a note: It’s not the keystone library. The keystone library doesn’t properly compensate for perspective distortion so I ended up writing my own solution instead. You read a little about it on my blog (and see the problem with the keystone library that I’m talking about).

      1. Speaking of which, does ANYBODY have a good minecraft server to recommend? I used to play on one, but after a few griefing incidents and admin efforts to prevent them, the whole world kept getting reset on a regular basis, and new RPG elements kept coming up.

      2. @jzoe My favorite minecraft server is sacredlabyrinth.net although I am a bit biased because I am one of the admins. We are going to change one of the worlds in the next few weeks but after that we will maintain the same world for some time.

  2. Determining the correct vector-space transforms to get the image to display correctly would be a pretty cool applied math problem for undergrads :3

    extra points for perspective adjustment!

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