Virtual Worlds

Choose a world

Each one opens straight into flight. Drag to look, use WASD to move, and press 1–0 to jump between landmarks.

Tokyo 東京

Skytree and Tokyo Tower over a city of small houses, the Shuto Expressway on its viaducts, trains in their line colours, and neon from Shibuya to Akihabara.

Shibuya CrossingSkytreeRainbow BridgeSenso-ji

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31.23° N · 121.49° E

Shanghai 上海

Lujiazui’s real skyline in LED colour, the Bund floodlit gold, boats on the Huangpu, and crowds under the neon of Nanjing Road.

Shanghai TowerThe BundYu Garden

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40.76° N · 73.98° W

New York

Manhattan’s real street grid with nearly 143,000 buildings, the Empire State and One World Trade, the East River bridges, and avenues that glow at night.

Times SquareCentral ParkBrooklyn Bridge

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33.81° N · 117.92° W · Anaheim

Disneyland Resort

Both parks built from OpenStreetMap: fireworks over the castle, the Mark Twain on the Rivers of America, the monorail and the railroad running, and World of Color on Paradise Bay. An unofficial fan model.

Sleeping Beauty CastleMatterhornPixar PierCars Land

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Assembled from the map

Every street, river, park and tagged tower comes from OpenStreetMap. The rest of each city is generated to match how it is really built, and the landmarks are modelled by hand.

0buildings in New York, on Manhattan’s real blocks

0Shanghai towers over 100 m, placed on their real footprints

0Disneyland trees, each mapped one by one in OpenStreetMap

0buildings in Tokyo, most of them two- and three-storey houses

Real data

Streets, coastline, rivers, parks, rail lines and building footprints with their heights, all from OpenStreetMap.

Generated city

Blocks fill with the local way of building: brownstones, south-facing towers, dense Tokyo houses, Main Street storefronts.

Hand-built landmarks

Twisted towers, lattice spires, castles and bridges, each placed on its real footprint and lit for the night.

Draglook aroundWASDflyScrolldive in1–0landmarksTtime of dayDouble-clickfly to a spot