Coding agents are the ultimate sandbox game

It turns out the Environment Agency have done a LiDAR scan of England. They provide point clouds with 1 metre lat/lon resolution, showing the measured height of the terrain at each point, across the entire country. They provide both a DTM ("digital terrain model") and DSM ("digital surface model"), where the DTM has been somehow processed to only tell you actual terrain, while the DSM tells you heights including vegetation and buildings etc.; there is also a combined point cloud that gives you DSM heights but includes a classification of each point to say whether they think it is ground or vegetation or a roof. James Nation recently posted a 3d reconstruction of Bruton Dovecote, using the Environment Agency LiDAR data to provide the shape of the surrounding terrain, this is how I found out about the LiDAR data. So this sounds like an incredibly powerful dataset, but what can we do with it? I started trying to just make a viewer so that I could explore the point cloud dataset and…