It's racing time!
…and how archilogic is about much more than furnishing your home
(Not here to read but to race? click here.)
This article is written in two parts. First I’ll simply explain our latest tests in gaming functionalities and show how you can race through multiple spaces and apartments. In the second part of this text I will elaborate on the general ideas of Archilogic — where we want to go with this and why we believe it is important that there can be a racing game, among other functionalities, within the Archilogic universe.
Let’s Race!
Remember the 90’s Nintendo game ‘Micro Machines’? That cute game in which you raced your friends over a kitchen table in tiny cars? We built something like that in Archilogic. The cars are slightly larger, and it is all still pretty beta, but it is fun as hell.
To try the game, simply go to this archilogic folder and select a course. The app runs on mobile, but to beat your friends or the highscore we recommend you use a desktop computer. While the level loads, enter your name and choose between single or multiplayer. If you opt for multiplayer, you either host a game or join one. The game starts when the host starts manually or when 4 player joined.
Please let us know what you think. We know it’s not perfect yet, there are a couple of glitches and you might have to reload the page from time to time, but we already had tons of fun. I’ll explain why this racing game is that important to us in the next part of this text.
The future of Archilogic and the future of our homes
It is now 3 years that we at Archilogic are bringing interior spaces online in 3d. It would literally fill books to describe all the things we built in these past years, but the most important result of all these efforts is that we built a platform. A platform, that turns simple inputs (pictures of floor plans or meshes) into smart data. Semantic data that is editable and can be connected to real life products. This data is displayed in an easy to understand, natural, three dimensional way on most of the end consumer devices.
We have digitised millions of m2 of interior spaces and learned from the millions of users populating these spaces. The most important lesson was probably, that we can not build all the things that these wonderful early adopters would love to do with their digital homes. The possibilities are too many while the potentials are to0 big to not be pursued. There is literally a million things that you can do with a integral database of real interior spaces — on a space by space level as well as in a whole ecosystem.
This is why we have been working hard on a software development kit (SDK), that lets developers build their systems on top of the user base and production that we already established. Following the mantra “Eat our own Dogfood” we built most of the new features in the past year in this SDK and we love it. The SDK helped us to create smart objects from stairs and curtains or material changing furniture, the a parametric version of the Serpentine Pavilion, this autofurnish prototype of Mies van der Rohes Core House or the car racing game above.
The SDK is ultimately is much more powerful in the hands of the community then just with one company. It is the foundation of an ecosystem. So it becomes Archilogic’s task to digitise the world’s interiors and connect it to the web while the developer communities creates meaningful functionality to populate these models.
The racing game is two things to us. First, it is an application that has a focus on community. Not only is the real time multiplayer aspect a completely new feature tree but the scoreboard is a history as well as a documentation of the community engaging on the courses. Secondly it is a test in functionality that leaves the realm of architecture, the culture we come from and are so comfortable in. This shows that the engine can be much more than an interior decorating tool. It can be anything that we can think off and ads value to the way we see the spaces that surround us.
There will be many more applications following this little game, especially once the SDK goes public. But first we still have a lot of homework to do. The kind of steps that are not done overnight. If all things go well we can expect to release an early version of the SDK by the end of this year.
Till then we are curious to learn what you would want to build on top of Archilogic.
