Bratislava 2022 Model

Interactive urban model of Bratislava, Slovakia

The BA 2022 model is a commercial project I worked on with Subdigital and Abaffy Design for HB Reavis in 2017. It fuses design, engineering and software to explain the connection of large real-estate development to its surroundings in the city of Bratislava. The model's 3x4K screen shows a stylized animated map of the city. The presenter interacts with the model via a connected mobile tablet and controls what the map shows.

While not initially intended, the engine in the model ended up being mostly a compositor of animated layers (each potentially running internal simulations) that could be turned on and off individually. Blending animated layers was a simple mental model for representing features in the engine - every user-visible feature is a either an data-controlled animated layer or a blend thereof.

Even in idling state with no active highlights set by the presenter, the model still displays a lot of PRNG-guided moving elements like transportation and pedestrians. While we knew we would have powerful consumer hardware available, we still wanted to be conservative with the CPU and GPU budget so we partially specialized and precomputed simulation and animation data offline whenever possible.

Because of the requirement to render HTML and the fact that the team was mostly familiar with web technologies at the time, the engine runs on (carefully written) TypeScript and paints pixels via WebGL and a small amount of Chromium-rendered SVG. While that wouldn't be my choice for what is basically an embedded project today, I am still grateful for the iteration speed it gave us.