Isopolis turns San Francisco into a giant isometric pixel map

Isopolis, a web project at sf.isopolis.city, presents San Francisco as a single isometric pixel painting that fills the browser window. The map is built from the city's real 3D geometry, redrawn tile by tile by a fine-tuned image model, so streets and skyscrapers follow the actual layout of the city rather than an artist's impression.

How the map is built

The project cuts the city into square tiles of 512 pixels, stored as WebP images and served across a series of zoom levels — enough to move from a bird's-eye view of the whole peninsula down to individual blocks. Its public tile manifest lists 2,630 source blocks. Geographic context comes from OpenStreetMap data via CARTO, while neighborhood boundaries are drawn from a dataset published by DataSF, the city's open data portal.

The look is deliberately retro: the interface uses the pixel fonts Press Start 2P and VT323, and every label, mascot and landmark is rendered as chunky pixel art. A credit line in the app reads “Made with love by nuwandavek”.

Tours, radio and postcards

Beyond panning and zooming, Isopolis behaves like a small game. Guided tours walk visitors from stop to stop, each with its own mascot, and an overview screen offers an interactive 3D model of the tour's mascot that can be dragged to spin. A built-in radio plays music while you explore, and the search field accepts either a place name or a shorthand tag such as “corp” (company), “lmrk” (landmark) or “evnt” (event).

Clicking a marked place opens a card with its coordinates and details. From any spot, a postcard button renders a pixel postcard of the current view right in the browser and saves it as a PNG named after the place you are standing on; it can be shared to X or handed to the Instagram app. Because the viewer's position, selected place and active tour all live in the URL fragment, a copied link restores the exact same view for the next visitor.

Why it matters

Isopolis is a reminder that city data can be more than a utility: pixel art laid over real geodata turns a familiar skyline into something worth exploring step by step. The map runs in the browser with no installation, at sf.isopolis.city.