Brighton's Amex Stadium recreated in Minecraft by students

Students who are part of the university’s Minecraft Society used digital models and 3D scans of the campus near Falmer to import the university’s buildings and Albion’s stadium into the virtual world.

The model in the block-based game draws a close likeness to the area in real life, from the campus’s trees and courtyards to the Amex football pitch.

Tom Harwood, 25, who is studying an integrated master's in computer science at the University of Sussex, was part of the HackSussex society when he and others realised the Minecraft Society had fallen dormant, with no one running it.

He said: “Because a lot of us know about the game and know how to run things like servers and set things up technically, we thought it would be a good thing to take under our wing.

“We knew a lot of people would have played the game growing up, so we wanted something different to convince undergraduates to come back and jump into Minecraft and engage with it.

“There’s a lot of scans out there and satellite data of campus and us being computer scientists, we knew all we needed to do was change it from one piece of data to another with a bit of code in between.”

The University of Sussex recreated in the block-based game Minecraft (Image: Sussex Minecraft Society)

Tom said it was a long process to take scans and images of the campus and surrounding area and place them into the virtual world.

He said: “I had to scan around 100 pieces of satellite data, which are all quite large, and stitch them all together in 3D modelling software and convert the entire thing to place it in Minecraft.

“My computer was not very happy - it was quite a large endeavour. It is quite a powerful computer but it ran out of memory due to the size of the area.

“It was around 1.4km squared that I scanned in, having all that loaded at once was an issue.”

By the time Tom had finished putting the model into Minecraft, the area spanned around 19 million blocks in the game and took five days of full-time work to import and process.

Tom expressed some relief that most of the buildings on campus are built with brick and concrete, materials readily available in the game.

The Minecraft Society is now looking for extra people who know spaces across campus to help complete the interiors of all the buildings. More than a dozen people have already joined the project to reconstruct the campus digitally.

“I only know the department I’m in and a lot of other places on campus are unknown to me,” Tom said.

“It looks lovely from the outside, but if you walk into a building it is completely empty. It’s about adding the corridors, putting in the rooms and building the spaces on campus.”

Halls of residence at the university have also been recreated, but the interiors of the buildings are empty at the moment (Image: Sussex Minecraft Society)

It is not the first time the campus has been recreated digitally, with a Sussex graduate previously bringing it into the game Second Life.

Professor Kate O’Riordan, pro vice chancellor for education and students at the University of Sussex, said: “It is brilliant to see the Minecraft build of our beautiful campus and to see the ingenuity and commitment of our students leading this.

“Computer science at the University of Sussex has an amazing history, connected to the invention of the internet in the 1970s.

“I think the campus architecture lends itself to digital aesthetics - there was a smaller build of the campus in Second Life in 2008, also led by a computer science graduate.”

Students and alumni interested in taking part and contributing to the project can contact the Minecraft Society on Instagram at @minesocsussex.