TripDingo

One of the little quirky things I did when I first moved to Shanghai was to get a map and highlighter to keep track of what places I’ve been to or through. Given how large and foreign Shanghai was to me at that time, it was a novel little project that I hoped would encourage me to break my comfort zones, get out there, and explore this incredibly vast and dense metropolis. Armed with a 2005 city map and my trusty yellow highlighter, I’d fill in all of the new places I’ve trekked each day.

Two year’s later, I’ve simultaneously highlighted plenty and plenty still remains blank. To be certain, I stopped bothering quite some time ago as I really had better things to do than to pore over maps trying to remember and ascertain what new real estate I covered recently. On the other hand, however, this city is just too big…and it changes really fast.

They say a third of the cranes are located in China. Whether this little factoid is true or not, there certainly is a ton of construction going on all the freaking time. My 2005 map is, for sure, quite outdated. In fact, quite a bit of the information that was on it was wrong from the get-go or maybe certain projected developments were changed and revised over time. Street names change, new skyscrapers are erected, and new metro lines are added.

 I used to think the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall over in People’s Square was pretty darn nifty. In fact, I thought it was so nifty, it became a mandatory sight to take visitors. Surely, they would be as awe-struck as I was by the model replica of the city that takes up nearly an entire floor of the building, right? I mean, you don’t need to be an architecture model geek or SimCity nerd to appreciate a massive scale replica of a city, right?

Tip of the World Financial Center, Jin Mao Tower, and where Ethan Hunt did crazy shit.

With that in mind, imagine my nerdgasm when someone passed on the link to www.edushi.com to me. Holy shit. This shit is fucking AWESOME. Oh sure, it is mostly eye-candy, but damn, that shit’s delicious. It makes me squeal with delight. You can’t help but zoom out and in and drag around searching for places and buildings you recognize. Okay, duh, I’m not really saying but the obvious here but, obviously, this is beyond nifty.

And how so?

Well, first of all, you do have to admire the amount of work that putting something like this invariably requires. They must have a ton of modelers on staff (or someone who is just really productive…which is reasonably impossible in China) and I can’t even imagine how frustrating it’d be to update these cityscapes as things change. As I mentioned above, things change pretty quickly here in China. It’s definitely not the Big Dig.

Second, the potential applications. According to the company behind this, they definitely envision virtualizing the urban environment. While I doubt these pretty little cityscapes are built upon a foundation that would eventually allow people to “wander” around in them with virtual avatars, it is a reasonably entertaining channel for mashing and then disseminating urban geography and services. And while men may do better than women when it comes to reading maps, women are better than men when it comes to orienting oneself according to discernable landmarks. Even if on a most superficial level, it definitely helps to know what the building you’re looking for looks like.

But yes, this is mostly about eye-candy. Sweet, delicious eye-candy.

Tags: architecture, building, edushi, eye candy, landmark, map, simcity, urban

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 7:33 pm and is filed under China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.