LightMap Monaco – Low-resolution, three-dimensional model of the Principality
LightMap Monaco – Low-resolution, three-dimensional model of the Principality
Field Notes · 2026-08-05
LightMap is the map of Monaco rendered in light. 179 hand-cut acrylic cuboids stand on a base the size of a small table, each one an individually addressable RGBW pixel. Together they form an abstract, low-resolution, three-dimensional model of the Principality that reacts to live data and responds to touch.
Terence Grover built it solo over about three months: concept, data pipeline, electronics, firmware, fabrication, software, sound, and the film that documents it.
The first problem was turning a real place into a grid of cuboids that still reads as Monaco. He pulled the territory outline, the coastline, and the block structure from OpenStreetMap and cleaned it in QGIS. For elevation he used topographic data from Copernicus.
Monaco is built on a steep slope, and that verticality is a large part of what the place feels like in person, so the heights had to be real rather than decorative. He added the height of the buildings but kept them low-impact, wanting the piece to mostly reflect the natural elevation of the terrain. OSM coverage was thinner than expected, so he wrote a script to add the missing structures back until the footprint matched the real city.
Every acrylic piece has to pass cleanly through a hole in a laser-cut stainless steel plate, without clipping the metal. A fraction of a millimetre off in the model becomes a piece that binds or sits crooked in the finished object, times 179. From QGIS he exported the cutting outlines as DXF, brought them into FreeCAD to prepare the files, and sent them out for laser cutting.
Then came the sanding. Days of it. Raw acrylic is too clear, so the light passes straight through and reads as cheap, with the LED showing as a hot point at the base. Sanding every face frosts the surface so each cuboid glows evenly along its whole height. The least glamorous part of the entire project — and the one that most changed how it looks.
the original report: CreativeApplications Network