Paris en Vie is an interactive 3D model of Paris moving through a single day. Every bus, metro line, tram, RER, and regional train is animated across the city, alongside live traffic flow and flights descending into CDG and Orly, all layered over the real building geometry and waterways that define the city's form.
A full day of transit and traffic data compresses into a scrubbable timeline: speed it up, slow it down, jump to any hour, and watch the city's rhythm change with it.
The name means Paris Alive. The project treats the city as a system: millions of daily movements running through three centuries of urban structure, made visible in a single view.
It was built in a week, during one of Paris's worst heatwaves on record.
The Data
Transit — IDFM Île-de-France Mobilités
Route geometries, stop locations, and scheduled vehicle positions come from the open data platform of IDFM, the regional transport authority that coordinates the entire Paris network. The Métro, RER, Tram, Bus, and TER regional rail are all sourced here, forming a continuous 24-hour simulation that reflects how the network actually runs — the quiet of 3am, the compression of rush hour, the steady afternoon churn.
Traffic — Paris Open Data
Surface traffic flow is drawn from the City of Paris's permanent road sensor network, published via Paris Open Data. Fixed counters embedded across the boulevard system log directional vehicle counts throughout the day, turned here into the glowing arteries of movement that pulse across the street grid.
City Geometry — IGN BD TOPO
Building footprints and heights, the Seine and its canals, and arrondissement boundaries are sourced from BD TOPO — the national 3D topographic reference database produced by IGN, France's mapping authority. Building heights are used to extrude a simplified physical model of the city, giving depth to the transit layers moving above it.
Flights — OpenSky Network
Flight trajectories are sourced from the OpenSky Network, an open-source global ADS-B receiver network. The data represents 24 hours of real arrivals and departures over Charles de Gaulle and Orly, rendered as arcs drifting through the atmosphere above the city.