Digital Ueno Park

I have a confession: I don’t love photogrammetry worlds.

They’re often not well done, and don’t offer an accurate impression of the area that they are trying to capture and present to the world. Chunks of the space will be missing or corrupt, and the resolution is usually terrible.

Digital Ueno Park takes the idea of photogrammetry in a different direction. Instead of attempting to present a modeled scan of the environment, it appears to take in LIDAR data and render each point as a single shaded polygon with an assigned color value. The net result is that you get a world which looks extremely like three dimensional pointillism (notably recognized in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in which the character Cameron is observing George Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” painted in 1884.)

This technique has a lot of potential to create digital artistic spaces that are also aesthetically pleasing and interesting to look at. If you are looking for worlds that have strong art visuals, then Digital Ueon Park should be one you absolutely visit.

(Rating: 8)

Most of the worlds created with lidar/point-scan aren’t anything to write home about. They have a similar vibe in that you can’t really tell what things are, but you kind of can. It’s kind of like drinking water that’s been sitting out for a while. Sure you can drink it, but it’s not amazing. Is that a bad analogy? Maybe.

But what I do know is that Digital Ueno Park is one of the better worlds like this. Instead of stagnant water, it’s a bit more like enjoying a nice, cool cup of water with a little bit of fruit sweetener. The world kind of feels like you’re walking through a pointillism painting, and it offers a very surreal and dreamy feeling that’s fairly fun to explore.

(Rating: 8)