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Intro

Excerpted from notes written on 2019-08-10

City can no longer be described solely by buildings and streets, stories passed from mouth to mouth among its members, tangible, visible, audible things that physically exist. Instead, the city is full of shops which suddenly appear and disappear, people suddenly gathering at an unknown events, and anonymous travelers enjoying the planned trips to places where no acquaintance lives. The physical city transforms into formless information, and people gather where information accumulates.

If the storage and flow of information draws people together, can the spaces created in this way also be considered part of the city? The city's members access countless websites and games. Although these spaces may follow different rules from physical cities, they extend the city in that interactions can occur between people and people, or between people and the elements that make up the space, and in that some kind of experience can take place during the time spent in that space. Then, can we say that the city we live in is composed of a connection of urban fragments formed by different rules?

The city we are walking through has as many other layers as there are new spaces where city information is gathered. Or, among the cities we scroll through with our eyes, some cities actually have a space that can be walked through.

City, Game.

Excerpted from notes written on 2019-08-05

The experience of a city is shaped by the range of languages (whether spoken/written language or spatial language - any modes used to understand the city) that visitors can comprehend, as well as the information about the city that they already possess. Similarly, the experience in a game is based on the breadth of information that players can perceive and understand within the game, combined with the prior knowledge and information that players bring into the game experience.

Let's define the "city experience" as the experience we go through while directly walking around the city ourselves. Can we also talk about a "city experience" in games? Games also have fields or areas that the player occupies, and the player can navigate between those places by operating a keyboard or controller. One difference between games and the real world is that for gameplay, the game server operated by the game company and the device used for playing additionally mediate between the game and the player. The breadth of information the player receives depends entirely on the game client. Specifically, it depends on the methods the game client uses to interpret the information received from the game server. The information players already know is based on what was downloaded to their device when installing the game.

Let's imagine a situation where a new costume is updated in the game. Players download the new costume information to their local environments through the game update. During gameplay, if they encounter a player wearing the new costume, the server sends information about the type of costume the other player is wearing to the client. The client then interprets this and displays the corresponding new costume information from its local data on the other player's character on the screen. But what happens if there is a player who has not updated the game? If the server sends information telling the client to display the 33rd outfit, for example, but the client only has data up to the 32nd outfit due to missing the update, the client will encounter an error while trying to interpret the server's information. It won't have the data for the newly added 33rd costume.

The way that new costumes are displayed in games can vary based on how each game is designed and implemented. As such, the process of displaying a newly added costume could differ across games. Building on the previous example, the way an error related to missing costume data is handled could also differ. Some games may simply not allow players without the latest update to play at all, essentially forcing them to always have the full costume data downloaded. Other games may have a fallback and show a default costume or a placeholder graphic instead of the intended new costume outfit if that costume data is missing. If the game engine is not prepared to handle missing costume assets in a graceful way, then encountering new unreferenced costume data during gameplay could potentially crash the game outright. Different games constitute different cities. The way a game operates is akin to the underlying rules that form the foundation of a city.

If we view the real-world city as a game, we could consider our physical bodies as the client, the city itself as the server, and our sensory organs as functioning devices which receive information from the server. In that framing, how would updates to our bodies occur, and how is the prior information we carry managed?

Space, Translation.

Excerpted from notes written on 2019-08-08

Let's imagine that the spaces we've visited and stayed in are each like a room. And let's imagine that the time it takes to move between these rooms is equivalent to the time it takes using public transportation or walking. In this way, we can view the spaces visited in a city as a single house with multiple interconnected rooms. If we set a movement path within a space and lay out the experiences a person has at each moment while moving along this path according to time, we can create a long linear space with time as its depth axis. If you had a dream where you had to turn your body 1 and 3/4 turns to see the scenery you originally saw, it would be possible to decide on a way to map the angles in the dream to some concept in real space, allowing us to discuss both spaces in the same language.

The same space can be perceived differently depending on the subject observing it. It's said that people who travel by bicycle and those who travel by car understand the city differently due to the difference in speed. Humans and cats would have different understandings of the spatial connections within a city because they can move through different areas of the urban space. Dogs, with their superior sense of smell, would likely understand spaces by mapping olfactory information onto them.

Even a single individual can view the same space from multiple perspectives. Let's imagine visiting a popular restaurant for the first time. Some might view it in the context of its ranking among other restaurants they've researched online. Others might see it as a point on the map they observed while walking there. Yet others might perceive the restaurant through details such as the atmosphere of the neighborhood it's located in, the sequence of scenes they encountered while walking, or maybe the smell of baking bread from a nearby bakery.

We live among countless spaces and countless perspectives from which to view them. Space translators are people who create meaningful connections between various space-perspectives to enable significant interactions. An architect who proposes building a new facility by interweaving the relationships between work spaces and residential spaces in a city is also a space translator. People who walk while looking at map applications are mapping points, lines, and planes on the screen space to urban space and their own position, so in this case, the person who designed the application is the space translator.

Space translators need to consider what information to map onto spaces, and how to explain spatial experiences through this mapping. In an era where interactions between experiences in virtual spaces and real spaces are increasingly growing, we will need space translators suited to this reality.

Behavior, Bug.

Excerpted from notes written on 2019-08-18

The events that occur in reality are based on certain rules, such as the laws of physics. While there isn't someone managing these rules, we don't need to worry about these rules conflicting with each other or about unhandled exceptional situations. For example, we don't need to worry about scenarios like: "What if I jump up from a standing position and suddenly bounce off the floor, getting half of my body stuck in the ceiling?"

It's a different story in a city based on rules created and managed by someone. If the administrators haven't thoroughly refined the rules, unexpected things might happen. For example, yesterday you might have seen other people normally, but today it's possible that no one is visible. Or you might go to a specific location and hear conversations from a far-off place. Or part of your body might get stuck in the floor, leaving you unable to move. Let's call these unexpected occurrences errors or bugs. Analyzing the reasons for these bugs, we'd find that they occurred because the designated rules were followed. However, following the rules is separate from situations unfolding according to the rule-maker's intentions. Minor bugs might briefly confuse users, but some bugs could grant users administrator privileges, irreparably damage user information, or perhaps even paralyze the entire city.

In everyday life, various bugs, both big and small, will be discovered. In some cities, these bugs will be quickly managed. Some cities will be remembered for specific bugs, and just as laws differ from country to country, these bugs will become one of the factors determining a city's identity. The people of the city interact with the city through these bugs.

City, Memory.

Excerpted from notes written on 2019-08-31

Residents of a virtual city would be accustomed to the fact that their bodies and memories can be separated. If a part of their body is injured, they can fix it themselves, ask other residents or city administrators how to fix it, or, if all else fails, find a new body. While there may be no continuity in the body, there is continuity in experience, so, when changing bodies, memories imprinted on the body would disappear, but memories derived from experiences would be shared with the new body.

A city being damaged or breaking down is quite different from an individual resident being injured. Some cities might repair themselves, or be partially isolated and restored under the influence of administrators. But finding a new body? A city's continuity is tied not only to the current state that results from the history of its places being maintained, disappearing, and newly emerging, but also to the experiences of all residents who make up the city or briefly pass through it. While city administrators can record and later verify the creation and demolition of places, individual experiences in these places remain only in the memories of residents unless specifically recorded. Thus, a city's memory could essentially be seen as a collection of its residents' memories. Since both the places that make up the city and the residents who compose it are necessary for the city's continuity, transferring a city to a new body is not a simple matter.

Cities hold the memories of their residents, and the residents' memories form the memory of the city. Some cities lose their continuity when places holding memories are destroyed, while others lose continuity when the memories of their residents are destroyed. If it's confirmed that residents are being harmed due to structural issues in the city, the city's administrator must modify the structure. Since some places in the city may become inaccessible during modifications, structural changes must be approached carefully. Those who manage the residents' memories can be seen as the ones who are actually managing the city's memory. They must take extra care to ensure that memories are not destroyed when accessing, relocating, or modifying them.

City, Seeing.

Excerpted from notes written on 2019-09-06

In the physical world, there's no limit to the detail a city can show. While we may consider how much detail to express in designing and constructing buildings, and how much of this detail city dwellers will see, we don't worry about how to handle omissions in the process of conveying details that already exist in front of our eyes. The gaps between floor tiles with only millimeter-scale variations, walls with natural stone patterns preserved, smoothly finished concrete walls...

How do we 'see' a natural stone wall in a virtual city? Let's assume we start to see a natural stone wall in the distance. The details and position of the natural stone wall are stored somewhere as information. This information flows into a repository where original data is gathered just before it appears on our screen. There, considering my position and the wall's position, the wall's information is converted into a form suitable for display on the screen, and then the wall appears. The screen has a resolution, and no matter how detailed the wall's information is, if the area displayed on the screen is small, the wall's information is converted to fit just that area. If the wall's information is too large, it will take time to convert it, causing a delay in its appearance on the screen. Earlier, we vaguely mentioned that the wall's information flows into a repository, but depending on the path it takes, additional time might be required. To see just one wall, there is a loss of visual information and some time is consumed.

These were considerations unnecessary when designing a physical city. While displaying one or two walls on screen might not raise concerns about wall detail or loading time, as the number of walls increases, more space may be needed to store information, transfer times for that information may increase, and rendering times may grow. To better grasp the scale, let's think about leaves instead of walls. Showing one leaf isn't an issue, but what about a tree with thousands of leaves? What if there's a hill with thousands of such trees? What if there are thousands of such hills in the city? Interestingly, we need to consider how to handle leaves on hills outside our field of view. This information must exist somewhere since these leaves are part of the city, but they don't need to be rendered immediately if we can't see them. If it takes 1/100th of a second to render one hill, it would take 10 seconds for 1000 hills. If only one hill is visible to me, rendering all 1000 would hinder my view of the city. So, how should we handle leaves we might see someday, or perhaps never see at all? In a physical city, did we ever worry about people who might never visit a building we constructed?

Viewpoint, Filter.

Excerpted from notes written on 2019-10-03

Moving forward in a first-person perspective, a list of usable items appears in part of the right side of your view. You can select and equip desired items from this list while continuing to move forward without stopping. In some places, the perspective detaches from you, allowing you to see yourself from an oblique angle looking down, or directly from above. Sometimes, while constraining left-right movement, the world you move in is projected onto a plane we can see, allowing for an overall view.

What should we do if a large rock or tree appears in the view, obscuring the oblique perspective of you moving forward? If you suddenly disappear from view, it might give the impression that you and the viewing perspective have become separated. To mitigate this, we need to somehow prevent the separation of the viewpoint and yourself. Therefore, when an obstacle appears between you and your viewpoint, the obstacle might suddenly disappear, become semi-transparent, or your silhouette's outline might appear through the obstacle.

In some places, only specific objects may appear to glow, or desired paths might be highlighted in different colors. While moving forward, you can simultaneously think about things that don't exist around you, or things you're not looking at, as if you're seeing them, and this immediately reflects in your actions. Resources are being used to diligently fetch and display information about things around you, yet you're not interested in these, but rather in information about things that aren't in front of you. To think based on things you're not looking at, you might need to consider how detailed this information is and how quickly it's updated.

City, Memory.

Excerpted from notes written on 2019-11-03

There are cities that implement policies to make residents fit certain standards, and cities that implement policies to expand standards to fit their residents. The characteristics of a city can be understood by observing how policies change in response to residents' behavior.

How does a city observe its residents' behavior? It would be ideal to collect and log all the information that residents receive and generate while residents are connected to the city, and analyze it later. However, this is impractical because it requires vast storage space to gather information from all residents and necessitates developing methods to analyze this data (moreover, we need to consider what 'all' is when we are saying we are collecting all information from residents.). Therefore, it's more realistic to establish a system that selects and records only partial information about specific situations, periodically analyzes this data, and records the results.

What information is collected, how it's analyzed, and how the analysis results are incorporated into policies can be said to form the foundation of the city.

City without Collisions.

Recombined notes written on 2019-02-27, 2019-03-18

1

We can see the city, so it's possible to see and avoid people, facilities, cars, and buildings before colliding with them. Then, in a city where the concept of collision doesn't exist, wouldn't we not need to see things for the purpose of avoiding them? Seeing to avoid essentially means seeing to notice if there's something near me that could reach the same space where my body will be in the near future. In a city without collisions, there would be no problem even if an object occupies the same space as me, so it would be okay not to care about the objects around me, and therefore it wouldn't matter if the visual information of surrounding objects is updated at slow intervals. If so, both the provider of visual information and the judge of visual information could reduce the resources spent on providing and judging information, thus reducing the operating costs of the city.

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Since we won't collide with nearby objects, we don't need to look hard at anything except what we want to focus on. Originally, if we were looking at a distant electronic display and suddenly a ball flew in front of our eyes, we would have to see it and avoid it, but now we can ignore it and keep looking at the display. In a classroom, we don't have to worry about colliding with a nearby window or a friend sitting next to us when we stretch our arms left and right. Whether objects are far or near, things we're not interested in don't need to be expressed in detail. Interior design will become the exclusive domain of those who want to see it, and to someone not interested in space, an empty warehouse and a hall decorated in Baroque style might look similar (what exactly is 'space' to this person?). Since it would be possible to experience the city just by applying simplified details to most objects, it's possible to further reduce the city's operating costs.

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If we don't need to see the city because there are no collisions, we need to redesign all elements that assume collisions. There's no need to let a crowded elevator pass, no need to walk at the pace of the person in front on stairs. There's no need to be in contact with six people in a packed subway, and no need to worry about bumping into people coming from the opposite side in a transfer passage. Corridors can be narrower than 90cm. I'm not even sure if we need the concept of a corridor since we won't bump into walls either. No matter how high we jump, we won't hit the ceiling. Then, is there a need for a floor?

The city without collisions is also a city where the human scale is redefined.