WEEK 09 · 2026-03-09 ~ 15

From station to taxi

The second group consultation said the design and the technology were finally in balance, then questioned the project's entry point itself. By week's end the MRT station was replaced by a first-person taxi interior, which the project still uses.

Last week ended with two things in place. The PIC/FLIP particle system had been built into a real working system. The MRT station exterior had been designed as the visitor’s entry point. Both were responses to the simplify feedback from Week 7. Going into this week’s group consultation, I thought the hard question had been answered. What came back from the room was that the hard question had not been asked yet.

By Sunday the MRT station was no longer the entry point of the project. A taxi interior was. The rebuild took the rest of the week and produced the version of the exterior I am still using now.

THE SECOND CONSULTATION

The atelier scheduled another group consultation this week, the same format as Week 7. Faculty and classmates gathered, each person showed where their project was, and the group responded. I came in more confident than last time because the work had changed shape. The integration was running, the MRT station was visually coherent, and the feedback pattern from Week 7 seemed to have been addressed.

Andreas’s first response agreed with that reading. The balance between design and technology, the thing he had flagged in Week 5 and Week 7, was no longer the problem it had been. The visuals were working. The technical complexity was still present but it was not drowning the design out any more. That sentence alone would have been enough to make the week.

Then he asked a different question. Imagine a tourist who is about to visit Singapore for the first time and lands on this project before the trip. What is the first thing they should see. Is the MRT station really the right answer.

The room agreed with the question immediately. The other students chimed in with variations on the same point. The MRT is how you move once you are already in Singapore. It is not what you picture when you think about going there. It is a means, not a destination. As an entry point for a piece about the sound of a city, starting someone at a subway station asks them to care about transit infrastructure before they have been given a reason to care about the city at all.

I agreed almost immediately. The truth is I had been uneasy about the station for a few days already. The visual language was working but the atmosphere felt slightly off from what I was trying to evoke. I had not put a finger on why. The consultation named it.

FROM STATION TO TAXI

The replacement came out of the same conversation. If the entry point should be the moment someone actually arrives in Singapore, the honest answer is a taxi. A visitor lands at the airport, walks to the taxi stand, gets in, and the city starts moving past the window. That is the real first experience of the place. The MRT comes later, once they are already there.

A taxi also gives the project something the station did not. The visitor is inside a closed interior looking out at a changing exterior. That is already the spatial grammar of the work. Interior holds the audio, exterior holds the particles and the architecture, the window is where the two meet. The MRT station had to simulate that relationship. The taxi is that relationship.

BEFORE · MRT station exterior

Week 8 version. The entry point was a hologram rendering of a Bugis MRT station. Visually coherent, conceptually the wrong first moment for a tourist-facing piece about the sound of Singapore.

AFTER · Taxi exterior

Week 9 version. First-person view from inside the taxi at night. The hologram treatment is retained, now applied to the cab and the city seen through the window rather than to the station itself.

The hologram treatment from Week 8 carried over. The reason for using it in the first place, that the work is a reinterpretation rather than a simulation, is still true under the taxi framing. What changed was what the hologram is applied to. Week 8 used it on a piece of transit architecture. Week 9 uses it on the city seen through a moving window.

BUILDING THE TAXI EXTERIOR

The rebuild happened fast. Most of the architecture work had already been done for the station so the modelling skills and the shader setup were in place. What had to be made new was the scenario. Not a stationary platform this time but a first-person interior with the city sliding past outside.

The scene is a night scene. Late enough that the city lights are the dominant visual and the ambient dark gives the hologram textures room to breathe. The visitor is sat in the back of a taxi, having just landed, heading toward wherever they are staying. The buildings outside are not random. I modelled each one individually, sized and positioned and rotated so the skyline reads as a real route through the city rather than as a single repeating background. The feeling I wanted is the one you get the first night of a trip, when the city outside the window is still anonymous but already full of sound.

Interior · inside the cab

The cab as the frame the visitor sits inside. Everything the work does is seen through this space.

First-person view inside the taxi — Opening view from the back seat. The driver is already seated, the cab frame holds the edge of the window, and the world outside is about to move.

Hologram taxi driver at the wheel — The driver rendered in the same hologram language as the city outside. He belongs to the cab and to the work, not to reality.

Marina Bay framed through the windshield — Marina Bay first read through the taxi's own frame. The windshield becomes the threshold between visitor and city.

Destination selection interface from the back seat — The destination selection interface reached from the back seat. The cab is not just a frame for the city, it is also the point from which the visitor chooses where to go next.

Exterior · city past the window

What the visitor watches while the cab moves. Individually modelled buildings, the bridge, the bay.

The taxi on a bridge under the full moon — An outside frame of the cab itself, placed on the bridge with the moon over the bay. Establishing the space the visitor is sitting inside.

Bridge crossing at night — The bridge seen from the cab window. Long hologram lines carry the eye toward the skyline before the skyline resolves.

Marina Bay skyline in hologram language — Marina Bay skyline read through the hologram language. The scale the visitor actually registers on arrival.

Merlion hologram with Marina Bay Sands — Merlion lifted to landmark scale, rendered in the same hologram language. The treatment from last week's station, applied now to a symbol the visitor already recognises.

Texture · the hologram language

The projection-surface treatment that carries from cab to city. A live synthesis sits alongside three frames of the treatment in use.

A CSS-only synthesis of the texture language in isolation. Vertical data-bars, horizontal scanlines, a sweep highlight, and an irregular flicker, all driven by the same rules that run on the scene textures.

City buildings under solid hologram scanline treatment — The scanline treatment on architecture. The city reads as projection even before any audio begins to move it.

Detail of a single tower in hologram treatment — Single-building detail. The scanlines carry through the full height of the facade, so the surface never resolves into a solid material.

Abstract hologram light sweep across the city — Abstract moment during a transition. The hologram behaves like a projection pass sweeping over the skyline, which is exactly what the language claims to be.

The taxi interior itself stays minimal. No driver figure, no dashboard detail. The visitor’s body is implied by the framing rather than drawn. Everything the visitor looks at is outside the window, which is where the work is. The cab frame exists to create the inside-outside boundary and nothing else.

FINAL RESULT · END-OF-WEEK STATE

End of Week 9. The Marina Bay skyline read through the hologram language, seen from inside the taxi. Buildings individually modelled and placed, night atmosphere, Merlion lifted to the scale of a landmark. This replaces the MRT station as the visitor's first point of contact with the work.