A cool recent C# project - Basilar is a web browser for Windows that builds a 3D city as you surf.

The concept is to try and introduce spatiality into the surfing experience; We speak of home pages, web sites, we follow links, we talk in chat rooms. The way we talk about and imagine the web isn’t really the way we experience it. This project’s an attempt to narrow the gap.

Although developed before I’d seen her work, there’s a similarity to Flavia Sparacino’s City Of News. I thought I’d work in C# for the learning experience; I knocked up a 3D engine using The Tao Framework for OpenGL graphics, and the browser is embedded IE.

Every new website visited causes a new building to be created. The buildings are generated procedurally and textured with text and images from the visited site. Lightmaps are calculated and baked in. For each site visited, it’s importance is checked by seeing how many incoming links Google lists for the site. Higher-ranking sites get larger buildings!

The road networks in the city are procedurally generated Voronoi diagrams, and lots for buildings are created as needed. Billboards in the city are textured with webcam shots.

The city can be explored at street level or from an aerial perspective.

I have a lot of cool plans for this - see the included start page for more details.

Binary-only release for now; I’ll release source if there’s a demand.

Download Binary (1.0Mb zip file)