Images: Visiting the 'Scalable City'

Sheldon Brown's "Scalable City" software aims to show how fields like video games and urban planning can take advantage of computational power, and in the process automate work that previously might have required dozens or hundreds of animators and artists.

Brown's algorithms automatically create cityscapes that urban planners might love for their aerial aesthetic value, but that create fundamental problems of scale.

Based on so-called "L-curves," which Brown said are similar to fractals, the Scalable City multimedia system can rapidly terraform barren landscapes, filling them in with gracefully curved roads and neighborhoods full of new houses.