VE Processing Project 2 Idea

For my second Processing project in Virtual Entertainment, I am going to try to create a simulation which abstractly resembles a long-exposure aerial photograph of a city at night.

A road map will be generated or imported, and various vehicles, controlled by simple AI, will drive around, leaving light trails behind them.  These light trails will trace the shape of the roads, and, based on the popularity of the roads, lights will appear along the side, causing some areas to look more “built up”, while other areas remain dark.

My first step in researching this was to figure out how I would create the road map in processing.  Ideally, I want to use actual road maps of actual cities, rather than having processing generate a fake road map, so I looked into a few options for importing real street data.  The first option was to use the TIGER/Line files provided by the US Census Bureau.  I did a lot of research, but couldn’t find a good way of importing these .shp files directly into processing (although it must be possible, since Ben Fry did it).  The files are in binary format, so opening them in a text editor doesn’t reveal anything useful.  They appear to be mainly for use with GIS software.

After poking around a bit more, I found that the National Atlas offers much of their data in a RAW format for download as .e00 files.  I found even less documentation on how to deal with these files, but at least when I opened them in a text editor, the data was decipherable, and it is easy to pick out coordinate pairs.

I’m not sure exactly what to do with these points yet, or how to place each grouping in relation to each other, but at least this is something I can work with.  Plotting one set of points by hand resulted in a squiggly diagonal line – not very exciting, but presumably it will look more interesting when done on a larger scale.  Unfortunately, the file seems to randomly switch formats several times throughout the file, presumably storing different kinds of data.  This means I would have to decipher 3 or 4 different formats of RAW data, and figure out which was the actual road data I’m looking for.

I also found that the US Census bureau offers some data, such as zip code boundaries, in ASCII format, which is also readable in a text editor, and looks fairly similar to the e00 files:

This isn’t street data, but at least the format is consistent the whole way through, and it appears to be slightly easier to decipher.  This could lead to an interesting “USA as a city” project, where I create the simulation using zip code boundaries as streets in a city.  I may also look into the possibility of using other kinds of data, like airline flight paths, to generate my fake road map.  This could turn out to be interesting, and I would much prefer to make this project a visualization of some sort of meaningful data than to have processing generate fake random street layouts, which is currently my last resort.

The next step will be to import the e00 and ascii files into Processing, and have the program plot all the points onto an image, so I can see what I’m working with.