This is a little slice of downtown Raleigh, lifted out of the ground and kept somewhere quiet. It runs from the museums of history and natural sciences, past the State Capitol, south to the performing arts center, and from Red Hat Amphitheater in the west across to Moore Square and Marbles in the east.
Leave it alone and it looks after itself. The light changes, weather rolls through, and the locals get on with their day.
What it's built from
Pretty much everything here starts as open data that somebody gives away. Here's what went into it, and where you can get the same stuff.
- Buildings. The City of Raleigh's 2022 3D model of downtown. In photo realistic mode it's been turned into millions of soft dots of colour. Toy and cel shaded modes keep each building's real outline and height and dress it up as brick, stone or glass.
- The land. The hills come from the USGS 3D Elevation Program.
- Streets. Every road, its lanes and its one-way arrows come from OpenStreetMap, and so do the names on the street signs. The paving is drawn from that, with the city's 2025 aerial photos deciding how light or dark each stretch is.
- Trees and lawns. Each tree stands where North Carolina's 2015 laser survey found one, at the height it measured. The city's tree inventory says which are oaks, maples, elms, ginkgos and crape myrtles.
- Street lights and street furniture. Lights, parking spaces, pay stations, bike racks, bus stops and traffic signals are all City of Raleigh records, so they're where the real ones are.
- Buses. They follow GoRaleigh's real routes, 28 of them through downtown, from the city's transit data, and pull in at the real stops.
- Traffic. How many cars are on each street comes from NCDOT's traffic counts for that street, spread over the day the way weekday traffic usually goes.
- Cars. Those are ours too: a sedan, a hatchback, an SUV, a pickup and a van, drawn simply and not based on any real make. Where they park and how many are out is the real part.
- Statues and art. The city's public art list and OpenStreetMap say where each piece is. The statues are bronze figures we sculpted from descriptions and photos of the real ones (nobody has published 3D scans of them), standing in the right spots, and the Shimmer Wall on the convention center has the real one's 79,464 squares and its oak tree. The Great Raleigh Acorn is its real ten feet tall, and the 70-foot globe on the science museum wears NASA's Blue Marble picture of the Earth (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, image by Reto Stöckli).
- Weather and time. Switch on "Real weather in Raleigh" and it follows the National Weather Service reading at the airport. "Real time of day in Raleigh" follows the clock and where the sun is today. Otherwise it drifts on its own.
- Sound. The rain and birds are public domain recordings from Wikimedia Commons (rain and garden birds by ezwa, a northern cardinal by G. McGrane). The music is made up by your browser as it goes.
- The acorn folk. Those are ours. Raleigh is the City of Oaks, so acorns seemed right.
The dots are drawn with Spark on three.js.