The field of cartography is rich with [diverse map-drawing approaches](https://www.are.na/sophia-mick/maps-on-maps-on-maps) that haven’t found their way into an appropriate, interactive digital equivalent. Mainstream digital solutions tend to involve 2D overlays on a Google/Apple map pulled from an API. There’s space to create an entirely new “digital map” material, formed from the data and personal memories of users’ photo libraries…  [Hunter!📈🌈📊 on Twitter](https://twitter.com/StatisticUrban/status/1791151160671244558): > Fun GIF of Manhattan's population every day of the week. The difference between weekdays and weekends is stark. > *(Video attached)* The stacks in these tweets look a lot like buildings… it would be cool if instead of being mapped to population density, it was mapped to other things. - frequency of photos you take within certain areas - colors of the buildings could come from the photos themselves - taking a lot of photos within a certain radius would “grow” a building in that area whose height is based on the photo location frequency/density. - could layer onto the idea of theme-able personalized maps, with 8bit types or special color schemes - UI/UX inspiration from gaming and open-world map games - Apple Fitness ring UI paradigms for motivated city exploration. Which metrics would the rings represent? [[LLMs make information materials more malleable and transferrable]] [Rayshade Designs | Data Visualization Prints](https://www.rayshadedesigns.com/) So it’s stacked ‘histograms’ of photo frequency as “buildings” - Users feel a sense of construction in building out buildings across their city, ends up turning your home into the tallest building lol - Users can see each others’ cities overlaid onto theirs, or create collaborative ones - Color-coded buildings - Collaborate with your friends to create shared cityscapes - There’s a public city based on opt-in anonymized, aggregated photo-based location data. Only exists once a certain number of users have opted in for privacy - Companies can pay to create immersive branded events on the public city a la **Roblox** events - Other kinds of overlays, what new information can be gathered by transposing different kinds of height data on a map? ([[Intersections give rise to emergent possibilities]]) - User explored regions of the city have colored grounds corresponding to place categories? - Theme-able building styles, map art styles - Procedurally-generated building textures, or just minimal blocks like in that tweet - Come up with a few sliders/parameters for adjusting city vibe, in the vein of Arc Browser’s space customization menu—these can be via LLM prompts - Color palette - sharpness/roundness (edges) - pixellation - specularity - cleanliness / grittiness - brightness - shadows - highlights - contrast - Can add more parameters over time, or make a few of these customization options in-app purchases - Apply settings per-building or per-block - Purchasable skins - Earn coins based on visits, in-app economy similar to video games - AI-generated building textures / shaders ??? (“make my city look cyberpunk”) - Endless longer-term creative possibilities of giving everyone their own 3D cityspace based on their real city’s “floorplan” - See your cities in AR as an interactive diorama - Populate your city or your collaborative cities with NPCs - Raycasting light effects on iPhone 15 Pro and other devices that support it