earthToPixels Turns Cities into SimCity-Style Pixel Maps

Field notes

The renderer combines aerial map tiles, a model fine-tuned on hand-made pixel cities, and a stitching pipeline that produces a deep-zoom pyramid. The visible project has taken one location—João Pessoa, Brazil—from input coordinates to a finished explorable map, while a globe marks the places represented so far. The team identifies compute expense as the bottleneck for adding cities and describes the broader platform as still under construction.