Building Pune Pulse: a real-time 3D digital twin with an IDM/MOBIL traffic engine
I wanted to see my city — Pune, India — alive in 3D. Not a game with a fictional map, and not a navigation app tracking where I am. Just the real city, rendered accurately, with traffic that actually behaves like traffic. So I built it, solo, and shipped it free on Android as Pune Pulse . Here's the architecture, and the parts I think are actually interesting. Engines, not features The codebase…
Pune, India, came to life in 3D for the reporter who wanted an accurate representation of the real city. He built Pune Pulse, a free Android app that renders the actual road geometry and 95,666 buildings sourced from OpenStreetMap. The city runs on its own movement, separate from road traffic. The app's traffic simulation uses the Intelligent Driver Model (IDM) and MOBIL for car-following and lane changes, respectively.
These models, used in real traffic engineering research, allow the traffic to reroute when any road is closed. The running app never accesses OSM, ensuring offline functionality once the data is loaded. The renderer is React Three Fiber on top of three.js, and the entire app is simulation-first, functioning without API keys, GPS, or location tracking.
It's a visualization/simulation tool, not a navigation app. The source code is available on Google Play.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
