Hi HN! A few friends and I built EarthToPixels, a project that turns real-world cities into explorable pixel-art maps.

We fine-tuned an open-source Qwen image model and built a pipeline that takes aerial imagery, generates pixel-art tiles, and keeps neighboring generations visually continuous so they can be stitched into a large map.

We built the pipeline to work with arbitrary coordinates rather than a specific city. For the first complete render, we chose our hometown: João Pessoa, Brazil. You can explore it here: https://earthtopixels.com/

Would love to hear what you think, especially about the technical side.