A voxel Tokyo in real Japan time – ride the Yamanote line and study Japanese (jivx.com)
324 points by momentmaker 12 hours ago
socalgal2 4 hours 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 4 hours ago
i was expecting this lady https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUTD9r3G8W0 :D
bentograd 11 hours 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.
Tor3 10 hours 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.
NaiveBayesian 7 hours 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.
Rohansi 7 hours 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.
weakfish 8 hours 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.
Rohansi 7 hours 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.
wyrdcurt 4 hours ago
johngossman 10 hours 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 2 hours ago
Furigana is a lifesaver
netsharc 6 hours 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
LastMuel 10 hours 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 hours ago
Works fine for me on a 17e.
LastMuel 7 hours 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.
socalgal2 4 hours ago
Lawyer24 9 hours 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.
marginalia_nu 9 hours ago
Voxel Tokyo has very pleasant vibes.
TacticalCoder 8 hours 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).
zelphirkalt 3 hours 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 2 hours ago
Medical emergency might well be somebody committing suicide (or trying to).
zelphirkalt 2 hours 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.
rustman123 15 minutes ago
smilespray an hour ago
Zababa 9 hours ago
This looks good and I like the idea but I don't get what the "practice" is here?
philote 7 hours ago
Yeah I loaded it up and had no idea what to do.
nsfmc 5 hours 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.
Zababa 4 hours ago
fitsumbelay 5 hours ago
very cool and runs pretty nicely on my 2019 mac mini
kingkool68 5 hours ago
This reminds me of Sim Copter from when I was a kid
swang 4 hours ago
any volume control? voice is a bit loud and i couldn't find anything to turn it down.
mrbluecoat 9 hours ago
What a cool idea! Need something similar for Korean - perhaps the EverLine light rail line in Yongin.
b112 2 hours 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 2 hours 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..
echelon 10 hours ago
Does this scale beyond N5/N4?
This could be a really useful tool.
badabidi 6 hours ago
Epic!
rimworld 10 hours ago
love the tunes
nexus2045 9 hours ago
lovely
wormpilled 8 hours ago
Slop
mercanlIl 7 hours 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.
Keyframe 8 hours ago
Looks nice, but what's the deal with Mickey Mouse voice? Is it sponsored by Disney or something?
mister_mort 8 hours 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.
3371 7 hours ago
IIRC it's a popular TTS character called ずんだもん.
jameshart 7 hours 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.
3371 6 hours ago
robocat 3 hours ago
Zababa 5 hours ago
vdsk 6 hours ago
Doesn't really sound like ずんだもん tbh. Can't recall which voice it is however.
AdmiralAsshat 7 hours ago
Japan likes their cutesy little-girl voices.
vlian2088 6 hours ago
that's just how their women sound to us. cutesy anime girls are voiced by aunties over 30.
redwall_hp 4 hours ago
kridsdale1 6 hours ago
Keyframe 7 hours ago
How infantile then
altairprime 5 hours ago
cynicalsecurity 6 hours ago
That is an anime voice.