Navigation
Schulze and Webb recently printed this fantastic mapping project called Here and There, showing perspective views of Manhattan morphing into plan views. My first thought in seeing them was “Why isn’t there an FPS renderer that does this?”. See the video to get a clearer idea of it, and how utilitarian at could be (As it happens, games were among the many influences on the project).
I’m reminded of Miegakure, a game shown at the Experimental Game Play Sessions at GDC this year. It has four spatial dimensions, which are easy enough to comprehend abstractly as coordinate sets, but more or less incomprehensible when rendered as a 3D slice of 4D space.
Here & There achieves the opposite by warping space and making more visible from a particular point, rather than obscuring space by adding to it. The bowed design of the map in uniquely suited to the form of Manhattan and the grid layout of American cities.
In games that deal with whole cities, we tend to have a first person view and an inset scanner. Why not a renderer without any real world analogy?
(Image from Here And There)
