Must Escape the Subway

http://www.traingames365.com/must-escape-the-subway/

Bryce Beating Escape the Subway

I was looking for any projects that dealt with subway systems. I came across an online game entitled escape the subway. The game is an old fashion point and click adventure where the goal is to find different tools to gradually make your way out of the subway. The game revolves around the idea of a person being trapped in a subway train and needing to escape to the street above. I was looking for a project that captures the experience of being near a subway system, and while this project does do that, I did not find exactly what I was looking for. This project also seems to focus on the fears related to subway culture rather than the joys or exciting aspects.

 Line Posters

http://www.lineposters.com/

Tokyo Transit System Designs

This is a business that sells graphic designs based on transit systems. I am very interested in the track and network aspects of transportation systems, so naturally I approve of this project. I appreciate the transformation of a spatial system to their abstract conceptual 2D form as displayed to the public on maps and other information booklets. The work also captures the merging of lines. While the line images seem to be accurate, they are also rather sparse. I would appreciate seeing some more detail or figures on the Washington D.C. shirt although the sparseness is indicative of the planned proper nature of the Washington System.

Artistic Model Train Layout

This model train layout that I found on YouTube has so much order that it excites me. The layout consists of a huge spiral with an entrance in the middle and an exit on the outside. On the track, travels a ridiculously long train with a regular pattern of cars and engines. The shear length of the train causes me to be impressed that no derailments occur. I consider this a work of interactive or at least moving art, because the train is ever moving and creates a circling field of geometry shapes that has a lovely texture as the train circles by. The repetition and logic of it all appeals the orderly side of myself.

As for improvements, it might have been better if the video could have been from a top down perspective instead of a gaze from the side, because then the 2D shapes of the cars would be more apparent. I also think that the lighting for the scene could have been better, the authors could have done more to create specular reflections at special angles through the material properties of the cars and the angles of the light sources. I believe the author was just having fun creating a train layout and was not attempting to make art, so it is not surprising that the work seems to lack dramatic considerations.

Sim Tower, Yoot Tower

I was referred to another great game involving elevator management last week. I found out that their were entire games based on towers and elevators made in the past including SimTower and Yoot Tower. These games are the kind that I would have been proud to have made.  Yoot Tower incorporates many features that I have thought of including allowing elevators permissions for certain floors, setting the resting floor for certain elevators, and controlling the amount of elevators that are built. I found the visual layout to be very helpful, because it provides many ideas for ways in which to present multiple elevators, floors, the underground, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTower

http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Yoot_Tower

This isn’t really “art” per-se, but a piece of research I really like, that I think has has cool artistic implications.   Building Rome in a Day is a research project that can take a sufficient (though not as many as you might think) Flickr photos of a particular site and, with minimal geo-data, create a decent 3D reconstruction in less than 24 hours.  This means that with a collection of photos from a particular site, one could create a plausible 3d image without having to take their own photos.

I think you could do a lot of interesting things with this research.  It would be interest to construct one of these models, and then explore it with a virtual reality headset.  With the advent of WebVR, it might be possible to create an interface where 3D models can be hosted and perused.  I think the ability to not only do this, but to do it quickly and with this level of success should be interesting to anyone interested in doing 3d work with real-world models.

It’s worth pointing out that, while a lot of work is done to ensure the compute power used isn’t exorbitant, the researchers still use far more than what one might consider “commodity” hardware.  It’s not reasonable to expect a consumer to make use of this algorithm without paying a heavy fee, or stretching out the reconstruction time.  I wonder what sort of implications this algorithm might, have, though, and if something cool might be doable on a smaller scale?

Building Rome on a Cloudless Day is an offshoot of the Building Rome in a Day project, which aims to have the same results/performance without a distributed system.

La Maison Sensible is an interactive installation in which the walls and furniture are given sensation and emotion.  Projections on the space respond to the user’s movement and touch, giving the sense that the “house” is responding to their actions with empathy and emotion.  I’m interested in this installation, because it uses technology and interaction to make the room itself into a character, which would be difficult to pull of without computation.  If I had a hand in this piece, I would want to give a narrative to the installation — have the room’s relationship with the audience change, or reveal something about its history.  Perhaps a user’s actions reveal some “memory” of the room and cause it to become sad or angry.  I think a truly “living” interactive room has a lot of potential as a setting and start of a performance.