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GO OUTSIDE

STAND AT AN ADDRESS · LOOK AROUND · IN CHARACTERS

ADDRESS

AUTO-STROLL

Walks the block on its own, steering around whatever it runs into. Any key or a drag of the mouse takes the wheel back. SPACE toggles it.

PACE 3.2 m/s

A walk is about 1.4. Hold SHIFT to break into a run.

RANGE 250 m

How much neighbourhood to load. Changing it goes back to OpenStreetMap.

FIELD OF VIEW 72°

DEPTH 14 m

Where the middle of the character ramp falls. Low is a foggy night; high sees to the end of the street.

GRAIN

Character size, so also how many rays get cast. Coarse runs faster.

CHARACTERS

The ramp distance gets quantised onto. Near is the dense end.

READOUT

A line at the bottom with your heading, how far you've wandered, and the frame rate.

CONTROLS

WASDwalk and sidestep
←→turn
↑↓look up and down
SHIFTrun
SPACEauto-stroll on/off
TABthis panel
Drag the view to look around; click it to hold the mouse. On a phone, drag to look and let the stroll do the walking.

WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING AT

Every wall is a real building footprint from OpenStreetMap, standing at its tagged height — or three metres a floor, or ten if the map says nothing. One ray goes out per column of characters, and how far it travelled picks the character: close walls come out of the dense end of the ramp, distant ones fade to a dot. The ground is streets, water and grass, thinning out with range.

The building at your address is drawn in pink. If nothing is mapped there you get a post to walk back to instead.

Same data, seen from a helicopter instead: ASCII CITY.

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, reached through Nominatim and Overpass — volunteer-run, so this page caches what it fetches and paces itself.

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