Inside Rohini at 7 pm: building a living street from open maps
Real streets and places from OpenStreetMap, generated people with routines, families and festivals of their own, and a road network to carry them. How Parallel Earth brings a Delhi zone to life.
At 7 pm on a Ramleela night, Rohini's simulated residents start leaving home. Most of them are heading the same way: toward Swarn Jayanti Park, the biggest ground in the zone. On the map you can watch a crowd form.
The place is real
Everything you see on the street view comes from OpenStreetMap, the map the world edits together: the roads by size, the parks and water, and the places people go. Rohini alone has thirteen metro stations, over a hundred schools and dozens of parks and grounds. We cut Delhi the way it is governed, into the MCD's twelve zones plus the NDMC and the Delhi Cantonment, so a zone on our map is a zone a ward office answers for.
The people are generated
Nobody on the map is a real person. Each resident belongs to a generated household, joint or nuclear, with a head and someone who decides the money, someone who leads the festivals and someone who handles schooling. They have jobs, ages and languages, and a tradition that decides which festivals they keep. The mixes we draw from are labelled as priors until they are fitted to national survey tables.
A day is a set of trips
01Morning
Children walk to the school nearest home; office workers ride to the metro; shopkeepers open up at the market.
02Afternoon
Homemakers go to the vegetable market; retired neighbours head to the temple or the park.
03Evening
On a festival night, those who keep it go to the big ground. Everyone else heads home.
04Life happens
A parent whose child is unwell stays home; a deadline keeps someone at work late. The feed says so.
Each trip follows the shortest path on the real road network, with a slight preference for main roads, the way people actually travel. The server plans a whole zone's day in well under a second.
Why build it
A simulated city lets us test ideas on the people they are meant for, at the times they would meet them. The next post shows the first use: putting ads on Rohini's hoardings before anyone pays for real ones.
Frequently asked questions
Are the people in Parallel Earth real?
No. The streets and places are real, from OpenStreetMap; the residents are generated and labelled as an AI-generated simulation.
Where does the map come from?
OpenStreetMap, used under its open licence. Zone boundaries are approximated from the location of each zone office until official boundaries are available.