We love cities. Back in the day, we used to play SimCity for thousands of hours just to witness our meticulously planned and constructed utopian universe get destroyed by an evil alien invasion. Even in our everyday routine, we heavily rely on Google Maps to plan our trips to parts of an unexplored neighborhood or even just the next coffee shop. Yes, we’re obsessed with urban environments, maps, and cartography (you HAVE to see this). The maps we’re about to present, however, were made in Processing rather than by an armada of Chinese slave workers. Anyways, they are awesome.

Processing, for those unfamiliar, is a java-based programming language primarily targeted to designers and people who preferred to draw skulls on their school tables rather than solve complicated math equations. It’s a practical tool box for rapid prototyping and visualizing databases, which makes it the perfect starter drug for those who always wanted to try coding, but were overwhelmed by the syntax madness. The developers of Processing regularly showcase new use cases on their exhibition site.

Matt Ditton is a photographer turned video game designer. On one of his jogging journeys he found out that the Abvio exercise monitoring apps are able to track your GPS location (while walking, running, or cycling) log the coordinates in a database, and then publish to Twitter. Matt Ditton processes this data in a sketch, illustrating the coordinates on an X/Y grid. Mysteriously, the visualizations look very much like the racing tracks in WipEout.

Matt Ditton explains his motivations:

[…] The maps that people make are really a unique fingerprint. Putting them together is an interesting process and, from a city point of view, it gives a great picture of where people move. But my background is also in games so in the back of my mind I think it would actually be cool to use the data as a starting point for a racing game. One of the favorite games of my childhood was S.T.U.N Runner, which is a good fit for the type of abstract path data I’m collecting. The 10,000 levels of Tokyo would make a cool game.

Here’s hoping Ditton’s ambitions for the project come to fruition. The 10,000 levels of Tokyo does indeed sound like something we’d happily lose hours of our lives playing.