A maze of … interestingness
November 14th, 2009 by BenI’ve been toying recently with the idea of loading an XML file of Flickr’s “most interesting” photos into a Unity scene and letting people explore them that way — kind of like a 3D photo gallery. I got it working a while ago but couldn’t think of a good way to arrange the photos for viewing until I started looking at maze generation algorithms.
So this little scene first generates a random maze and then populates the walls with recent photos that rank well for interestingness on Flickr. Thankfully the Flickr API has a nice way to pull those photos. The photos that appear change regularly, and the maze is different every time. The result has a nice art gallery feel to it.
Instructions
Use the W, A, S, and D keys to walk, and your mouse to look around . Clicking while looking at one of the oh-so-interesting photos will open its Flickr page in a new window/tab in your browser (your pop-up blocker may block it, so look out for that).
There is no way out of the maze at the moment, so just look around as long as you like. If you refresh your page, a different maze will generate, but the photos will mostly be the same. If you come back tomorrow, they will all be different (since the most interesting photo stream will have been updated).
Hope you enjoy it. And let me know what you think!
November 15th, 2009 at 10:27 am
Nice. Reminds me of the old school windows maze screen saver. How long did it take you?
November 15th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Not that long, actually. I probably spent several hours one weekend working on the Flickr thing, and I started working on the maze part last weekend. The maze generator went much faster than I expected. Then I just tweaked it until it seemed solid enough to post.
December 1st, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Ran through the maze again today and saw that one of the paintings went through a wall. I will email you a screen cap of it. Not sure if you can really do much about it but thought that I would pass it on. It only occurred once that I saw.