A voxel Tokyo in real Japan time – ride the Yamanote line and study Japanese

by momentmaker • 10 days ago

380 74 10 days ago

bentograd• 10 days ago

This looks very cool, but I find it very hard to read the text against the moving background. The lights in the "windows" of the voxel building do not provide good contrast.

johngossman• 10 days ago

Fun. I studied Japanese for two years, let it slide and now every Kanji is like "Hmmm, I've seen that before but..." I can still read kana though, which is nice to know.

iqihs• 9 days ago

Furigana is a lifesaver

rimworld• 10 days ago

love the tunes

LastMuel2• 10 days ago

This site caused my iPhone to start playing music and wouldn’t stop until I rebooted. I’m on the latest security release of iOS. Something off about that.

worrycue• 10 days ago

Works fine for me on a 17e.

LastMuel2• 10 days ago

I’m on an 11 Pro. The site works fine. The issue is the audio. It somehow continues playing after the page is closed and after the application I’m using is closed. It took a phone reboot to stop playing.

I’m not claiming that there’s malicious activity on the part of the site. I just wonder if there is something anomalous about how it plays audio.

echelon• 10 days ago

Does this scale beyond N5/N4?

This could be a really useful tool.

Tor3• 10 days ago

I don't know why, but that was an extreme load on my computer/browser. The picture changed every ten-fifteen seconds, I don't know if that's intentional or not, but it wasn't something I wanted to watch. The computer fan ran at maximum and it was hard to get enough CPU to close the browser tab.

weakfish• 10 days ago

If you right click on the page, you can 'open image in new tab' and get an image of the current screen. I assume that means it is rendering an entirely new image each frame... which is a tad wild.

Rohansi2• 10 days ago

I assume that means it is rendering an entirely new image each frame... which is a tad wild.

What's wild about that? That's exactly what it's doing and what most uses of canvas/WebGL do.

NaiveBayesian2• 10 days ago

For me it showed 400 fps in the top left corner and my laptop fans spun up immediately as well. Seems to render frames continuously rather than waiting for the screen to refresh. Would probably be much less load when limited to 60 fps.

Rohansi2• 10 days ago

You need to click the "fps" text for it to actually show the FPS value (it'll be green). The 400 you saw was something else.

mrbluecoat• 10 days ago

What a cool idea! Need something similar for Korean - perhaps the EverLine light rail line in Yongin.

Zababa3• 10 days ago

This looks good and I like the idea but I don't get what the "practice" is here?

philote• 10 days ago

Yeah I loaded it up and had no idea what to do.

nsfmc• 9 days ago

you listen to the audio and try to determine if you can either read or understand the audio. it's repeated twice, once formally and once casually, so good for listening practice, but also good for adding new words/phrases into your vocabulary since some of them might be familiar but maybe reconfigured in a way that you don't normally see in your practice.

this is probably only useful if you've started learning a very small amount of grammar, know hiragana well enough to make furigana useful, and have started memorizing enough kanji/vocab to make 'overheard train chatter' useful. probably, generously, something maybe 3-6 months into your japanese language journey, so not good for bootstrapping.

marginalia_nu• 10 days ago

Voxel Tokyo has very pleasant vibes.

TacticalCoder• 10 days ago

Tokyo has very pleasant vibes. It's an amazing city. My brother lives there since 30 years and I've been many times (it's so far that when I go, I go for 3 months).

My daughter loves it and, motivated by having japanese family, she's currently trying to learn japanese.

I think she'll love that site (I'll show it to her as soon as she comes back home).

Lawyer24• 10 days ago

I am going to reach out to you via email. I like this project and I am building something similar. Maybe we can collaborate or keep in contact.

nexus2045• 10 days ago

lovely

Keyframe4• 10 days ago

Looks nice, but what's the deal with Mickey Mouse voice? Is it sponsored by Disney or something?

mister_mort• 10 days ago

I think it's just one of the standard JP voice synthesisers available. I know I've heard almost exactly the same one on other Youtube videos using text-to-speech for Japanese.

AdmiralAsshat• 10 days ago

Japan likes their cutesy little-girl voices.

Keyframe4• 10 days ago

How infantile then

vlian2088• 10 days ago

that's just how their women sound to us. cutesy anime girls are voiced by aunties over 30.

33712• 10 days ago

IIRC it's a popular TTS character called ずんだもん.

jameshart2• 10 days ago

So.. I know many people can read hiragana, but it is a very annoying habit of people who know a bit of Japanese to post un-transliterated Japanese text on an English language forum. For someone who doesn’t know Japanese your post reads ‘IIRC it’s a popular TTS character called ??NOT?FOR??YOU??’ - it communicates no information.

Writing ‘a popular TTS character called ずんだもん (zundamon)’ takes you very little time and gives readers a little more to work with, and which they can use to Google English language resources on the subject if they are interested.

vdsk• 10 days ago

Doesn't really sound like ずんだもん tbh. Can't recall which voice it is however.

cynicalsecurity• 10 days ago

That is an anime voice.

wormpilled• 10 days ago

Slop

mercanlIl• 10 days ago

I get the same feeling. There’s a lack of polish and intentionality to it. It’s a cool idea and a nice demo, and there’s certainly a lot of buttons and features.

But it’s been laggy on my device, it’s visually distracting, and the UX doesn’t seem particularly well-suited for practicing Japanese.

netsharc• 10 days ago

The evening mode has vibes of Ghost in the Shell's "chase UI", glimpses of which is in this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amKt8ttja1E

badabidi• 10 days ago

Epic!

kingkool68• 10 days ago

This reminds me of Sim Copter from when I was a kid

fitsumbelay• 9 days ago

very cool and runs pretty nicely on my 2019 mac mini

socalgal22• 9 days ago

The voice does not sound like a native speaker. I don't mean it sounds like a non-human character, I mean something is subtly off. Timing or something. Is that intentional? Maybe pick a different TTS solution?

ranza• 9 days ago

i was expecting this lady https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUTD9r3G8W0 :D

choutianxius• 9 days ago

The voice does not sound like a native speaker.

It would be more attractive to me if it's vocaloid

swang• 9 days ago

any volume control? voice is a bit loud and i couldn't find anything to turn it down.

zelphirkalt3• 9 days ago

Meanwhile I am sitting in an InterCity"Express" train in Germany, which already started 14 minutes late, and somehow managed to drive so slowly, that at every stop another ~2 minutes were lost. Now just standing around at a stop, because of some medical emergency at the next station, and announced a delay of fucking 90 minutes. How long can it take to remove whoever causes the medical emergency from the tracks or wherever they are and continue driving? It is all so nuts here, all so idiotic. The last 10 times or so, that I have been traveling, every fucking time they have stupid issues.

And they don't even manage to have functioning displays inside the trains. Every now and then the displays are turned off. Why am I not allowed to see the up-to-date status?

darkwater• 9 days ago

Medical emergency might well be somebody committing suicide (or trying to).

zelphirkalt3• 9 days ago

Yep, but then what takes 1h? They must have had that multiple times already. Either get them off the tracks in whatever state they are in, or get them out of the train. I don't find it to be a good reason to punish the collective amount of all train passengers in any train in the vicinity by making everyone an hour late. It seems very unprofessional.

b112• 9 days ago

I watched for a couple of minutes, and while it kept saying Japanese phrases, it just showed me floating by a large city landscape. Certainly nothing like being in a train.

Do you just need to wait a while to be in the train? Or for it to start?

rambojohnson• 9 days ago

the experience for attempting to record my voice during practices is atrocious. the background music continues to play, and the obnoxious AI voice interrupted me at least twice, then it switched to "transcribing..." wth?

cute concept, please fix that flow..

astrange2• 9 days ago

I opened it and the TTS mispronounced the first sentence on screen. (ie it ignored the furigana and misread the first word)

kevin_thibedeau• 9 days ago

The trains need to be double-tracked rather than passing through each other.

chrisguilbeau• 9 days ago

I spent three months with my family in Japan (Feb-Apr). We were in Osaka and used trains exclusively, just working remotely, homeschooling, living life with a few day/weekend trips. This captures for me the simple, clean, engineered beauty of being in a Japanese city. I just sat an watched for a while feeling like I was back there. Having the easy to learn characters above the traditional ones is also super nice. Amazing.

Being able to hover over the characters and see the phonetics would be a nice bonus for us beginners.

A voxel Tokyo in real Japan time – ride the Yamanote line and study Japanese

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