Circa

Generative design project to produce large map-like artworks. Events will be written to assess conditions and trigger changes in the size, shape and placement of roads and properties to mimick the expansion of a real human-populated city. Parameters such as economic conditions will affect size and decedance of structures built on a property. Political factors such as public or private-sector dominance will affect variety of building. Land value will be determined by proximity to major routes and value of neighbouring properties.

The above image is a section of a print by Ashley Thomas. The inspiration for this project is to explore the question of what a code version of Ashley's very slow manual process could look like?

Above: Image shows the level of complexity that the project was able to generate at end of 2015

Above: Example from February 2016

Live at: http://circa.butterscotchworld.co.uk

Target Goal

The initial intention for this project was to be able to automatically generate highly detailed SVG files containing millions of properties which could then be loaded into a CNC router to cut a huge plywood printing block (at least 6 ft). This would be inked and pressed using a ride-on road roller at a public event open to spectators similar to this video from a Steamroller Festival in Canada: https://youtu.be/1tHgtmHc0bI

However, in December 2016, after receiving estimates of the cost and cutting time for such a large and complex pattern it soon became apparent this was unviable without significant financial input.

In October 2017 the project was reborn as a VR environment which can be experienced through a headset.

Interface routes

The application offers several ways to interact with the data:

View

/{id} - A non-interactive web-page for viewing an SVG of a map.

Develop

/{id}/develop - An interactive SVG view of the map with control panel to to send API requests to trigger map events and return results, updating the map if necessery.

SVG

/{id}/svg - Download an SVG file of the map.

VR

/{id}/vr - WebVR interface for experiencing a map via a headset.

API Routes

/api/... - Many operations can be triggered in isolation for development purposes.

Real-world events to be simulated

• 2 small neighbouring properties on high value land might merge to enable them to build taller.
• Wars or natural disasters may raze structures.

Technology

PHP 7, Composer, MySQL, JavaScript, jQuery, SVG, CSS, WebGL.

PHP does all the generation of items on the map, collision detection and reading/writing the database.

MySQL database-backed for saving data and efficiently being able to perform operations on a small section of the map by selecting points with a range.

Tests

Run PHPUnit tests: vendor/bin/phpunit

References

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1 (Second Edition) http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/

Coordinate Geometry http://www.mathopenref.com/coordintersection.html