A VIRTUAL NYC

NEWYORKEXITNEWYORK is an installation featuring a virtual environment in 3 dimensions built out of photographs of New-York City, USA. With a Joystick controller one can freely surf a city metaphor in real time 3D projected on a giant screen.
Priam Givord and Martin Lenclos created a representative New York City intersection by weaving together the city’s different dominate themes. NYXTNY is not a realistic turn-by-turn layout, but rather, it is an impressionistic representation of the streets: it leaves the spectator feeling a sense of the “New York-ness”. They tried to create something that could change the way we conceive, look at, and construct virtual space in that it is not total fantasy, but rather is based on familiar elements put together as a total vision - something that is nearly impossible in a real city.
Their virtual universe was created out of six thousand photo-stills taken with a digital camera. From these, thirty-nine thousand 3D elements were extracted to create this representative New York City. It was built much in the same way as a movie set which is comprised only of facades. These combined images create an illusion of a living city that can be navigated by the spectator. It is presented as an installation projected on the wall for which we use keyboards interfaces, joysticks, or even heat sensors to travel through the space.
NYXNY introduces a new representation of the world by representing a real AMBIANCE, not actuality. Most people can understand a culture and/or an environment, in a more positive and open-minded way, by looking at a metaphor rather than a one- by-one actual image data-base. Every city has its own singular personality. By illustrating its originality in looking at its landscape, its particular rhythms, its scales and its architecture, we can reproduce it as a single vision, seeing more clearly the aspects of its personality and collective structure.

Images by Martin Lenclos.

QUOTES"What they came up with is the surfing experience of the next decade.... You can fly through the urban chaos – brushing the underbellies of taxicabs and climbing the walls of storied skyscrapers".
Jennifer Hillner, Wired, July 2002
"27,000 objects comprise a composite universe of New York City.... 'New York Exit New York' is an ideal of a ‘city’ infinitely extending and ever growing.... The emotional part they are carrying along allows the observer to project him/herself into the picture".
www.siggraph.org, San Diego, California, USA, July 2003
"He was one who caught the 'virus' very young. As a child, he spent his vacations studying dominant colors of locales, studying them as recurring themes as seen on a street, a village, a region.... Now, Martin Lenclos stops merely observing the colors of his environment, he translates them into an intense cityscape. Martin Lenclos creates a representative New York intersection colliding themes that dominate the City".