Cityscape Lets You Quickly Build a Virtual Metropolis Using Physical Blocks
What if a virtual city could be arranged just as easily as your fleet in a game of Battleship? That’s what Robbe Nagel’s Cityscape achieves.
Play any video game set in the modern world and you’re most likely going to find yourself in some sprawling urban setting at some point. That city took a team of designers a great deal of time to create. That even includes the background of the city—not just the streets and buildings that you actually explore as part of the story. But what if an entire virtual metropolis could be created just as easily as arranging your fleet in a game of Battleship? That’s exactly what Robbe Nagel’s Cityscape project facilitates.
Cityscape is a “physical interface for a digital city,” as Nagel’s YouTube video title describes the project. It only takes a few seconds of watching that video to grasp the Cityscape concept. A user can place blocks into a special receiver with a grid of slots. Each block corresponds to a particular set of buildings, and each slot in the receiver grid translates to a city block. As soon as a block is placed into a slot, the virtual buildings appear within the digital city. By filling the slots with the blocks they want, the user can create a 3D model of an entire city within the span of just a few seconds.
That concept is brilliant, and the inner workings of Cityscape are equally clever. Each slot has a pair of contact pins protruding from the bottom surface. Those pins are connected to a Teensy 3.2 board. Each block has a resistor that touches those pins when the block is placed into a slot. Different blocks have different resistor values, and the specific block can be identified by measuring those. This ingenious mechanism helps keep the project costs down.
After the block’s resistor has been measured, which is done using functions coded within the Arduino IDE, a Processing sketch is used to place that block’s 3D model into the correct part of the city. Nagel created each of those models—which contain multiple buildings—in open-source 3D mesh modeling software called Blender. To add more variety, new city blocks can be modeled and assigned to additional resistor values. The receiver may be constructed out of LEGO bricks and wood, but the underlying technology is both practical and very impressive.
If you want to see more of Robbe Nagel’s work, you can check out his LinkedIn page.