At the tail end of last term we entered TaxiCity into the FTW Competition. A few weeks ago the announced the finalist and to our surprise TaxiCity was nominated in two categories! Now all the votes have been tallied and we are walking away with the award for best student application, which really is awesome. The winner of best open data application and the overall competition, Find-A-Home, is far more complete in execution than our project., though I feel our concept is a more unique use of open data. TaxiCity really has garnered a lot more interest than I think any of us expected when the project began, and I hope it continues in the future.

I have been working on TaxiCity since the end of January, but between getting the project rolling and the Olympics I haven’t had much time to update the site. This ends now!

TaxiCity is a Silverlight game created using open data from the City of Vancouver and the public Bing Maps API. Our team is working with Microsoft Government and David Eaves to create an engaging and interactive display of freely available data. In the game players will play as a taxi driver in Vancouver, picking up passengers and delivering them to key landmark locations in the city. Real world geometry creates the game map and the route tracking services provided by Bing will be used to guide the player to his/her destination.

Along with the game we are creating a generalized Silverlight game engine which we hope to release under an open source license when complete. Our tools for converting the open data into a game world will also be released so other citys or regions could be added in the future.

We are tracking development on taxicity.ca, which contains weekly builds of the game. Go check it out!