City of Light (COL): A City-Scale, Geo-Anchored Urban Simulator with High-Throughput Multi-Sensor Streams

Abstract

We present City Of Light, a Unity-based, city-scale 116 km² simulator of Paris for high-throughput embodied AI research. COL fuses open geographic information system sources into geo-anchored, per-tile meshes and provides a configurable, stochastic runtime with controllable traffic and pedestrians. Agents receive frame-synchronized multi-sensor observations (RGB, depth, normals, semantics) and execute step-synchronized actions to navigate the environment. To support high-rate vision pipelines, we introduce TURBO, a Unity-Python bridge that streams multi-camera observations and allows control at up to 1300 FPS, achieving higher throughput than ML-Agents in our benchmark. We also provide a Street View Digital Twin that aligns simulator viewpoints with corresponding real-world panoramas for frame-accurate visual comparison and quantitative matching. COL enables fast scripting, large-scale data collection, and reinforcement learning in geo-anchored urban settings.