April 2016 (revisited in early 2020)

Taxi, Taxi! is a digital installation featured on the 3-story display housed within Samsung 837, the new Samsung Experience Center located in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan.

Taxi, Taxi! is 1 of 4 different pieces we created exclusively for the towering video wall. It uses NYC Open Data taxi data plotted against routes created with OpenStreetMap (OSM) which is displayed within a 3D model of New York City. It is designed to run in realtime and was created with the Cinder C++ coding framework (the project was eventually rebuilt in Houdini).

The 3D model of New York City includes buildings for all 5 boroughs and parts of New Jersey. The geometry consists of 32 million vertices. All of the geometry was taken from OSM with the exception of the bridges and a couple of the more iconic buildings which were added manually.

The taxi data provided pick-ups and drop-offs for each cab. Using these positions in conjuction with the OSM data, we were able to create plausible routes which made use of main arteries and the correct use of one-way streets.