Artist statement

Einar believes video games are pioneering in technological realm way ahead of the Internet. Constantly seeking insights from video games, he imitated this project from his virtual experience of the post-apocalyptic game Last Of Us on PlayStation.

The refine visual images of the surrounding environments with all the simulated vegetation taking over the urban landscape leave Einar an overwhelming impression. He asserts, “I often end up thinking about how to recreate things I see, and video games is a big source of inspiration. By just recreating and mimicking their older techniques you can create something new.”

One of the best things with the web-development community is the strong tendency to active sharing of knowledge amongst each other and showing what we have learned from and to the others.

The project is heavily based on collaborations. With the Google Street View, a large image database of the environment is readily accessed. Yet many people overlook the fact that data are stored in each location as well.

With the Google Maps API, which gives us access to their service, we can also extract depth data. A short explanation, it’s a additional scanner mounted on the Google Street View Car that capture the distance to each point in the image, a so called depth-map.

These images are processed to get the angles and size of the walls of surrounding buildings. When doing these creative coding sessions it’s very much about iterations and “what-if”-moments. You learn how to notice the small details that can be saved to the next iteration.

What if I can navigate to the next street? What if I use a map to select location? What if adding a small movement to the camera and so on. You never know where it ends this time.

It took about two weeks of spare time development. I just posted the link on Twitter and a week later I had over 300,000 visitors, featured on news sites like Wired, The Verge, Daily Mail and PSFK.

Even a couple of TV-shows picked up the site, for example the Japanese TV-show ‘Sukkiri!’. It was real fun to see people using the experiment. Maybe it is something with the post apocalyptic setting that is mind-boggling and the respect that Mother Nature could take over some day in the future.

Technical statement

This experiment is viewed in a modern browser with WebGL-support. It’s available for free at http://inear.se/urbanjungle. In the online version you can search for your own address or city.

For best result, go to cities with tall buildings. For more information about the tech behind, please visit http://www.inear.se/2014/03/urban-jungle-street-view/