PIxel City Maps Are Here

Isometric NYC has definitely started a new trend for developing pixelated interactive city maps. In the last few weeks it has inspired Isopolis in San Francisco and London, drawn in London. Now a new project is taking the idea to Brazil - and suggests that we could soon be seeing a lot more of these pixelated cities.

EARTH TO PIXELS

earthToPixels has now transformed aerial imagery of João Pessoa, a coastal city in northeastern Brazil, into a sprawling, SimCity-style isometric pixel-art map.

Like the earlier maps, the pixelated map of João Pessoa is a joy to explore. Buildings, roads, parks and coastline are transformed into a giant isometric pixel-art landscape that you can pan and zoom through, revealing more detail as you explore.

What makes earthToPixels particularly interesting, however, is that João Pessoa is not a one-off. The developers have built a pipeline that takes aerial map tiles, renders them, stylizes them and stitches the results together into a deep-zoom map. In theory, it could do this for any city in the world. For now João Pessoa is the only city the team has taken all the way through to completion. But it doesn't look like it will be the last (and another pixelated map of San Francisco seems to be already in the pipeline).