Yesterday, I joked that one day, the Chinese would use Google Earth to make an entirely new New York in western China. And then today, we read in Leonardo Bonanni’s hyperexperience that “CityEngine is a powerful tool for modeling entire cities in perfect detail.” And they’ve already done Rome, with “200 monuments painstakingly modeled by art historians, and over 7,000 secondary buildings rendered parametrically.”
Apparently, the tool will allow you to “render every building, not just the most important landmarks” based on “a shape grammar language.” It will do for videogame cities what Spore is doing for videogame characters. And eventually someone will hook it up to a printer borne by a lighter-than-air vehicle and out of a complex series of disturbingly udder-like nozzles will come Rome, China.
