I wanted to build a mipmap version of r/place — zoom out and you see the whole world, zoom in and you're placing individual pixels at real geographic coordinates.
The map is the canvas. Seoul, Tokyo, New York — pixels live at actual lat/lon positions and persist there. Watch others paint in real time as you explore.
A few things I focused on: - WebGL-only renderer (dropped Canvas2D after profiling showed it was the zoom-out bottleneck) - SSE updates scoped to your current viewport only - Seeded pixel art in cities around the world to make it feel alive from day one
Free to use. Still early — curious what people think.
Show HN: WorldCanvas – R/place, but with a real world map as the canvas
worldcanvas.art