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A voxel Tokyo in real Japan time – ride the Yamanote line and study Japanese

268 points7 hoursjivx.com
netsharc2 hours ago

The evening mode has vibes of Ghost in the Shell's "chase UI", glimpses of which is in this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amKt8ttja1E

johngossman6 hours ago

Fun. I studied Japanese for two years, let it slide and now every Kanji is like "Hmmm, I've seen that before but..." I can still read kana though, which is nice to know.

bentograd7 hours ago

This looks very cool, but I find it very hard to read the text against the moving background. The lights in the "windows" of the voxel building do not provide good contrast.

fitsumbelay1 hour ago

very cool and runs pretty nicely on my 2019 mac mini

kingkool681 hour ago

This reminds me of Sim Copter from when I was a kid

Tor36 hours ago

I don't know why, but that was an extreme load on my computer/browser. The picture changed every ten-fifteen seconds, I don't know if that's intentional or not, but it wasn't something I wanted to watch. The computer fan ran at maximum and it was hard to get enough CPU to close the browser tab.

NaiveBayesian3 hours ago

For me it showed 400 fps in the top left corner and my laptop fans spun up immediately as well. Seems to render frames continuously rather than waiting for the screen to refresh. Would probably be much less load when limited to 60 fps.

Rohansi2 hours ago

You need to click the "fps" text for it to actually show the FPS value (it'll be green). The 400 you saw was something else.

weakfish3 hours ago

If you right click on the page, you can 'open image in new tab' and get an image of the current screen. I assume that means it is rendering an entirely new image each frame... which is a tad wild.

Rohansi2 hours ago

> I assume that means it is rendering an entirely new image each frame... which is a tad wild.

What's wild about that? That's exactly what it's doing and what most uses of canvas/WebGL do.

Lawyer245 hours ago

I am going to reach out to you via email. I like this project and I am building something similar. Maybe we can collaborate or keep in contact.

LastMuel6 hours ago

This site caused my iPhone to start playing music and wouldn’t stop until I rebooted. I’m on the latest security release of iOS. Something off about that.

worrycue6 hours ago

Works fine for me on a 17e.

LastMuel3 hours ago

I’m on an 11 Pro. The site works fine. The issue is the audio. It somehow continues playing after the page is closed and after the application I’m using is closed. It took a phone reboot to stop playing.

I’m not claiming that there’s malicious activity on the part of the site. I just wonder if there is something anomalous about how it plays audio.

iluvcommunism6 hours ago

[dead]

marginalia_nu5 hours ago

Voxel Tokyo has very pleasant vibes.

TacticalCoder4 hours ago

Tokyo has very pleasant vibes. It's an amazing city. My brother lives there since 30 years and I've been many times (it's so far that when I go, I go for 3 months).

My daughter loves it and, motivated by having japanese family, she's currently trying to learn japanese.

I think she'll love that site (I'll show it to her as soon as she comes back home).

mrbluecoat5 hours ago

What a cool idea! Need something similar for Korean - perhaps the EverLine light rail line in Yongin.

Zababa5 hours ago

This looks good and I like the idea but I don't get what the "practice" is here?

philote3 hours ago

Yeah I loaded it up and had no idea what to do.

nsfmc52 minutes ago

you listen to the audio and try to determine if you can either read or understand the audio. it's repeated twice, once formally and once casually, so good for listening practice, but also good for adding new words/phrases into your vocabulary since some of them might be familiar but maybe reconfigured in a way that you don't normally see in your practice.

this is probably only useful if you've started learning a very small amount of grammar, know hiragana well enough to make furigana useful, and have started memorizing enough kanji/vocab to make 'overheard train chatter' useful. probably, generously, something maybe 3-6 months into your japanese language journey, so not good for bootstrapping.

badabidi2 hours ago

Epic!

echelon6 hours ago

Does this scale beyond N5/N4?

This could be a really useful tool.

rimworld6 hours ago

love the tunes

nexus20454 hours ago

lovely

wormpilled4 hours ago

Slop

mercanlIl2 hours ago

I get the same feeling. There’s a lack of polish and intentionality to it. It’s a cool idea and a nice demo, and there’s certainly a lot of buttons and features.

But it’s been laggy on my device, it’s visually distracting, and the UX doesn’t seem particularly well-suited for practicing Japanese.

Keyframe4 hours ago

Looks nice, but what's the deal with Mickey Mouse voice? Is it sponsored by Disney or something?

mister_mort4 hours ago

I think it's just one of the standard JP voice synthesisers available. I know I've heard almost exactly the same one on other Youtube videos using text-to-speech for Japanese.

33713 hours ago

IIRC it's a popular TTS character called ずんだもん.

jameshart2 hours ago

So.. I know many people can read hiragana, but it is a very annoying habit of people who know a bit of Japanese to post un-transliterated Japanese text on an English language forum. For someone who doesn’t know Japanese your post reads ‘IIRC it’s a popular TTS character called ??NOT?FOR??YOU??’ - it communicates no information.

Writing ‘a popular TTS character called ずんだもん (zundamon)’ takes you very little time and gives readers a little more to work with, and which they can use to Google English language resources on the subject if they are interested.

33712 hours ago

I did but I removed the English part, not because I assume people can read hiragana, but because I assume people will need to search it up anyway.

narreme1 hour ago

fwiw i recognize "zundamon" (and many other romanized japanese names/terms) without needing to look them up, but can not read the japanese

Zababa1 hour ago

Copy-pasting "ずんだもん" into Google gives you everything you want with the sidebar info, copy pasting "zundamon" into Google gives the same Wikipedia link on the sidebar. "Popular TTS character called" is enough to imply that what follows is the name, that you can then search.

kridsdale12 hours ago

[flagged]

vdsk2 hours ago

Doesn't really sound like ずんだもん tbh. Can't recall which voice it is however.

AdmiralAsshat3 hours ago

Japan likes their cutesy little-girl voices.

vlian20882 hours ago

that's just how their women sound to us. cutesy anime girls are voiced by aunties over 30.

kridsdale12 hours ago

So are cartoon boys in the west.

Keyframe3 hours ago

How infantile then

altairprime42 minutes ago

Comparing our culture to others, women in the U.S. are raised to do much the same. Ask anyone woman constantly misgendered for not having a high-pitched woman’s speaking tone (e.g. pacific islanders) and they’ll confirm. Best not throw stones from glass houses.

cynicalsecurity2 hours ago

That is an anime voice.