I modelled our neighbourhood as a driving game for my 4 year old daughter.

I want my daughter to know that technology is hers to control. Growing up, I loved making new levels for Nibbles in QBasic, and then custom maps for Doom and Quake. Tinkering with friends is what got me interested in tech. I want my daughter to have that same sense of control and agency over the tech she uses. And it’s working, she’s giving me feature requests now which we can work on together.

The map covers the whole route from our driveway all the way to her school, which is about 10 km. I added four vehicles, our current two cars, a Nissan LEAF and a Kia EV3, our previous car, a Honda Fit, which is the car we took her home from the hospital in, and a school bus for good measure.

She’s still getting used to the controllers, so I introduced a kid mode which makes it easier for her to control. It’s got lane centering, automatically slows down for turns, and if she collides with me or a tree, she always wins. I’ll tune these behaviours as she gets more familiar with the controls, because right now she’s kicking my butt.

The map was created using my dashcam footage, open-source data like OpenStreetMap, aerial photos, lidar, and I’ve also been working on an acoustic drone detection project. And as part of that project, I created an iOS app for capturing reference images specifically for generating 3D models. So I use that as well.

What’s neat about this is I’m using our gaming PC to create games now. Instead of our gaming PC being idle overnight, it can be generating new levels for this game or updating the map based on the latest dashcam footage.

I have no plan to release this as a game, it’s specifically made for my daughter.

At the end of the video I have included a longer comparison of the game’s map and my dashcam footage for the same area to show that this isn’t just an AI slop demo. It runs the 5 km along County Road 3, ending up at my daughter’s school.