[michalskop]

How about printing a landscape from a map/contour lines? Do you think it is possible for example from OSM data? (That London looks totally cool.)

[maxerickson]

OSM is just vectors, there aren't a lot of limits on what the data can be used for.

This was recently posted to /r/openstreetmap:

https://touch-mapper.org/

I really don't have a sense of how useful such a map would be, but it's exactly a 3d extrusion of OSM data.

[saganus]

This is very interesting!

I don't really have anyone close that is visually impaired but this would be super cool to have at 3D printing events and such. Very neat idea.

[thatcherc]

It's not exactly contour lines, but I made a site [0] that creates STL files from a global digital elevation model. You can select a region of the Earth and get a 3D printable file of its terrain. Might be close to what you're looking for!

[0] - http://jthatch.com/Terrain2STL/

[buckhx]

In college my group used topo maps and a laser cutter to construct a map of Colorado. The burned edges had a really nice effect http://www.instructables.com/id/TwitMap-Topographical-Colora...

[dougmccune]

I'll plug an open source lib I wrote called shp2stl that converts shapefiles into 3D models suitable for printing.

http://dougmccune.com/blog/2014/12/30/using-shp2stl-to-conve...

[andrewgodwin]

As long as you can convert the data into a height field it's possible. I reckon you could do contours with interpolation.