Isopolis - Isometric pixel map of San Francisco
Show HN: Isopolis – isometric pixel map of SF
Isopolis is an interactive isometric pixel map of San Francisco, blending the charm of retro pixel art with modern web technology. Explore 583 places, from iconic landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge to startup hubs like Y Combinator and Anthropic. Navigate guided tours like 'SF 101' for newcomers or 'Ship It, SF' for founders, and discover hidden gems. The map is built with a custom fine-tuned AI model and inspired by isometric.nyc, offering a unique way to experience the city. You can even contribute by adding new places, which are reviewed by a human before appearing. Whether you're a local or a tourist, Isopolis turns city exploration into a delightful adventure.
Welcome to the golden age of side-projects! Isopolis is SF imagined by Qwen Image Edit 2511, fine-tuned on 3D Google Map renders, and built with my ragtag team of clankers.
- lawrencechen
Behind the scenes stuff:
https://sf.isopolis.city/dev.html
> The source is Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles. Isometric.nyc explored and rejected the use of 3d building data. It is pretty insane that US gov has free LIDAR data for every city in the US available to the public. I spent <30mins exploring this and stuck to google 3d images. Claude Code whipped up a scraper to stream the 3D Tiles and render with three.js. This gives the best "real" texture base for the model to learn from. Anything else would involve a LOT of manual work to get the inputs right.
> Now that we have the 3D tiles, we need to generate the ground truth pairs for training! Similar to isometric.nyc, I generated a few ghibli-style pixel-art images using Google's Nano Banana. SF terrain is very interesting. There are quite a few distinct features like skyscrapers in FiDi, the hills in the southeast, 2 iconic bridges, lots of coastline, piers, parks, suburban grids and lots of water. I generated a ton of images and curated from them. Getting consistent style was a challenge. There was a LOT of manual trial and error. But as usual, Claude Code added this feature to the dev app that allowed me to select the best images and approve them.
- rob74
Nice! But for a city renowned for its steep streets, this looks suspiciously flat :) Ok, you could say it's only a 3D rendering of a 2D map, and it probably has to be this way for practical reasons, to avoid hills obscuring objects behind them, because you can't rotate the map as far as I can see, but not seeing actual height represented in a 3D view still takes some getting used to.
Also, there are neighbourhoods and landmarks, but not actual street names as far as I can see? Not to mention transit stops/lines and other fancy stuff one could add...
- codetiger
This is incredibly beautiful.
A few months back I tried to build a my own version of Google Earth rendered in voxels. Basically building from the terrain heightmaps scans available in open public data. Making it smooth and tessellation to work was incredible amount of work even for a simple vexed renderer
- EZ-Cheeze
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/04/these-oblique-satell...
"Satellite images from highly oblique angles are pretty mindblowing"
If u like this u will like that
- murphyslab
Incredible. It's easy to just go on browsing and exploring. The massive, scrollable pixel art aspect reminds me a little of Floor796: https://floor796.com/