Why do companies like Apple & Microsoft sterilize themselves so?
Either way, really nicely made, I love it! Small change request: adjust the CSS to make the controls look less vibecode-y.
There's already subtle parallax in iOS etc.
Animated wallpapers could be subtle, like raindrops, or animate only when interacted with.
It’s also not realistic, in one landscape the billboard is taller than a 9 story building.
Human pixel art tends to be very deliberate about the exact colors of every pixel and their placement tends to follow idealized (but not necessarily geometric) shapes.
The last time I saw dithering this sloppy was decades ago when people would scan photos as low color images. It is its own vibe, but it's a cold and rough one. These artifacts feel more "realistic", but it felt like slop back then too.
They are. And they are charging $19 to buy AI generated art (https://safaelmali.gumroad.com/l/lofi-cities-complete-collec...).
The main conclusion I've come to is that it's less that I dislike AI art inherently, and rather that I value the human decisions in media that I personally care about, and AI media threatens both its creation and how much other people value such things.
I first saw Paris from inside the room, and only later realized that 90% of the cities seem to be outdoors. It did make me kind of miss the indoor theming of the local area.
Also make me think how cool it would be to be able to toggle between being indoors or on the balcony. Shift the volume of the music vs the weather, maybe add some city sounds and shift them as well. Finally, it means you could have twice as much visual variety for only 50% more art.
Of course, ymmv. But give it a try.
https://loficities.com/tokyo/?obs&weather=leaves
or i don't know if you are but this is how i think i feel a lot of the time haha
With AI, instead you feel a connection to the sum of all humanity.
https://safaelmali.gumroad.com/l/lofi-cities-complete-collec...
andsoitis•3h ago
Actually, shouldn't it be possible to auto-generate any city via AI on demand?
vunderba•1h ago
There's definitely some manual curation. They even have assets that are clearly being placed into the scene, like the boats moving in the water.
You could theoretically generate all possible animated sprites (birds, people, vehicles, etc.) for use in any given cityscape, but automatically segmenting/detecting the different valid "paths/waypoints" where those assets should be placed would probably end up looking pretty janky.
XenophileJKO•1h ago
Honestly I was blown away, it is one capability that blindsided me. I haven't been this surprised by a capability lift in a long time.
vunderba•30m ago
- parallax, which might be some clouds moving in the background.
- weather effects which is mostly just an overlay
- animated sprites that interact with, or at least move along, the different sections of the static scene.
It'd be neat to see how well it could recreate some of the larger set pieces like Westminster palace.
I've definitely seen some pretty impressive automated AI voxel stuff (and that was 6 months ago) and that's having to deal an extra dimension. [1]
Personally I still don’t see a situation in which you could do it completely hands-off though. I think you’d end up with some pretty good scenes and some really terrible scenes requiring post-adjustments. It would be an interesting experiment at any rate!
[1] - https://github.com/Ammaar-Alam/minebench