Catalogue of Making

The project runs as a native desktop program, not a web app. Seven layers stack from human input down to the GPU and back to pixels. Mouse, keyboard, and webcam feed MediaPipe, which turns hand motion into twenty-one landmarks per frame. Python holds the main loop and decides what each frame should look like. ModernGL is a thin wrapper that speaks to OpenGL without getting in the way. OpenGL 4.3 runs compute shaders across SSBOs, which is where the particles actually live. The RTX 4070 Laptop GPU takes that work and paints the next frame sixty times a second. Each layer only talks to the one above and below it, so the stack stays simple to reason about.

Every interior is a container; the exterior is the bridge. The taxi is the threshold between. Its glass is an active surface, not mere cladding, that splits the experience into what approaches and what opens up. Bugis is built as layered glass because its cultures are transparent to each other. East Coast Park is built as a canopy because the district itself is a roof of leaves. Each interior follows its own spatial logic, but all share the same grammar of approach, threshold, and interior volume. Future districts will inherit the rule and break it where the district demands. The grammar is not a template but a starting point. Singapore has many skins. This project shows three of them and leaves space for more.

PIC/FLIP is a hybrid. The Particle-in-Cell method interpolates velocities through a grid and smooths away noise; the Fluid-Implicit-Particle method keeps velocity on the particles themselves and preserves motion. A single blend parameter, here a slider, chooses how much of each. David Li’s WebGL FLIP was the reference. Its clarity was too useful to rewrite from scratch. The extension specific to this project is an axis-aligned bounding box. Bugis needs a room that holds its water; containers need walls. Particles reflect at the six faces, and the grid sampler clamps at those same faces so the fluid behaves like it lives inside a building rather than an infinite plane. Quiet audio lets the fluid settle. A strong beat lifts the whole volume at once.

Audio enters as waveform, exits as force. An FFT splits each frame into three bands. Bass drives radial pulses, mids drive surface waves, treble drives ripple sparks. Recording is two-layered on purpose. An always-on ambient bed of the district plus a distinctive layer for foreground events. Zone-based mixing decides which recordings are audible according to where the visitor stands inside the world. One flag, “always-audible”, is reserved for the East Coast Park waves. The sea is part of ECP whether you are near it or not. Bugis keeps its prayer calls zoned, following the geography of the block, so coexistence is audible, not explained. The system runs on twenty-six recordings total, thirteen per district. Each was captured on site with a portable recorder and trimmed to loop without a seam.