City Residuals

City Residuals, a paper by Runqi Zhou presented at DiGRA 2024, describes an interactive web development project that treats the city as an interface capable of provoking individualized perception and encouraging visitors to reconsider urban functionality and potential. The project proposes that the web's interactivity and flexibility can produce a highly customizable experience, and it experiments with gamified interaction mechanisms and spatial representation within digital media. Its stated aim is to contribute insights for creators of online games, web-based experiences, and gamified systems involving spatial interaction.

The project draws on urban and spatial theory, including the Situationists' approach to exploring urban space and Juhani Pallasmaa's phenomenology of space. It builds a virtual landscape from Google Maps 3D tiles combined with custom 3D assets, retaining some realistic information from selected urban sites. Users navigate by mouse and can interact with 3D objects, which open browser windows containing curated information or alter the visual effects of the environment. These interactions layer spatial and browser-based elements, which the author ties metaphorically to the Situationist concept of the dérive, reframing cyberspace as a new urban landscape to explore.

Conceptually, the work positions digital information and hyperlinks as the sensational encounters of everyday life, using them to arouse curiosity against the mundane. The author describes a hybrid reality situated between the 3D space and the 2D browser window, and between hyperlinks and digitized information. The paper is a design and conceptual exposition rather than an empirical study, so it presents no survey data, sample sizes, or statistics. Its scope is the design of a single experimental project, with supporting screenshots and links to a live version and project documentation.