SCRAPER

Using real world design skills to create a potential post-apocalyptic future solution…

New Austin is a city in the future. After the earth is ravaged by global warming, political warfare, and industrial neglect new cities rise to rebuild the planets ecosystems, societies, and environments. Nvision is fortunate to be working with the amazing team at Labrodex and their visionary leader Jim Ivon. Scraper is his creation and has evolved into a highly acclaimed VR game as well as a novel, spin-off game products, and a variety of tech innovations. https://labrodex.com

Designing New Austin began with a download from Jim about his vision and the story. Taking that core content and extrapolated it to a definition and logic for the city and its functions. As defined by the backstory, the the cities should be concentrated and focused, as if for some reason they were mostly new.  Our main story set is “New” Austin after all. This begs the question, “Did something happen to old Austin?” What we needed was a logically contrived clean slate, a logic reset. 

Discussions with Jim Ivon that the future had probably seen multiple catastrophes, environmental or otherwise. There were consequences.

Imagining the new cities to be protected with barriers. Global warming having advanced and the oceans had encroached on the mainlands. The barriers around the cities would be large terraforming factories in the process of repairing and revitalizing the majority of earths surfaces. So huge robotic machinery (all sizes) of this type,  busy as work refurbishing and planting the earths surface to modify it to exist in the new environment while the damaged ecosystems were repaired over time. In between cities are large deserts and damaged landscape at a state of 30% repair. Within the city are green, lush, tech-enhanced living conditions… 

As this is a game environment, we set our task to design for expansion. Expansion opportunities under water, into space, underground, and to other cities. Hyperloop like tunnels would take us to other cities that were designed as the water advanced, intended to be underwater structures (now completely submerged). At the top of the highest tower is a space elevator that takes us up to weather control platforms as well as orbital platforms. Transportation between countries and continents takes place at the orbital and sub orbital levels requiring less energy and has no environmental impact.  We had to consider if all these things correctly styled are possible within our story time frames and dates.  This, of course, was just the beginning of the process.