A Canvas Over Google Maps Lets Users Place Pixels Anywhere

[cryptohog]

According to Polygon, a new project has placed a massive interactive canvas over Google Maps, allowing users to place pixels anywhere in the world.

The platform, called Wplace, has been live for about two weeks, and in that time users have already “painted” cities across the globe. People are forming communities to coordinate their actions and create full-scale images. On the canvas, you can find country flags, text, pop culture characters, memes, and other creations.

From time to time, the site experiences outages due to the large number of participants.

Example: Canvas over the map of Tokyo.
A Throwback to Reddit’s r/Place

In April 2017, Reddit launched Place — an interactive canvas of one million pixels. Registered users could change one pixel to one of 16 available colors every few minutes.

The project quickly went viral, becoming a battleground for ideological and cultural clashes. Users formed groups to create, defend, or expand their pixel art.

The experiment returned in 2022, running from April 1 to April 4.

[Nahid Hossen]

This is like r/Place but with a geography twist — curious to see if we get “pixel wars” between countries or just massive collabs.

[Rimon Khan]

If anyone here’s playing Wplace, we should form an Undeads pixel squad and take over a spot on the map together.