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

momentmaker 361 points 70 comments July 13, 2026
jivx.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (17 comments)

bentograd

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

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.

rimworld

love the tunes

LastMuel

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.

echelon

Does this scale beyond N5/N4? This could be a really useful tool.

Tor3

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.

mrbluecoat

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

Zababa

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

marginalia_nu

Voxel Tokyo has very pleasant vibes.

Lawyer24

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.

Keyframe

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

netsharc

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

kingkool68

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

fitsumbelay

very cool and runs pretty nicely on my 2019 mac mini

socalgal2

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?

swang

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

zelphirkalt

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?

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