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Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to I Was Here – Draw on street view, others can find your drawings

Hey HN, I made a site where you can draw on street-level panoramas. Your drawings persist and other people can see them in real time. Strokes get projected onto the 3D panorama so they wrap around buildings and follow the geometry, not just a flat overlay. Uses WebGL2 for rendering, Mapillary for the street imagery. The idea is for it to become a global canvas, anyone can leave a mark anywhere and others stumble onto it.

I Was Here is a web application that lets users draw on street-level panoramic imagery from locations worldwide. Drawings persist and are visible to other users in real time, with strokes mathematically projected onto… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    An interactive 3D visualization of the all the buildings in Manhattan.

    2018 · tbaldw.in · its alternatives →

  2. 2
    DreamFlow▲283

    Turn map screenshots into aerial cinematic videos with Veo3

    2025 · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    View, version, and share your .sketch files on the web

    2016 · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Instantly see a Google Street View of any supported location. Easily share and save your favourite views.

    2012 · qsview.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Draw art with people around the world on an infinite canvas

    2024 · everyonedraw.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6
    Here▲304

    Hang out and collaborate over video on a real-time canvas

    2020 · here.fm · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Hey HN! We're Ben and Izak, founders of Repaint (YC S23). Repaint is like Figma, but for creating real websites. It has panning, zooming, and dragging elements around. The settings closely follow html/css. We think an open canvas is a big improvement over other website builders. Everything is easier: styling, consistency, responsiveness… But making it work was hard! We thought HN would appreciate the tech behind it: - A custom WebGL rendering engine (w/text, shadows, blurs, gradients, & opacity groups) - A partial implementation of the css spec - A custom text editor & text shaper…

    2024 · repaint.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    I've been working on this project for about 4 years. It began as terrain only because world wide elevation data was publicly available. I then added buildings from OpenStreetMap (crowd sourced) and more recently from Overture Maps data. Some computer vision/machine learning advancements [1] in the past few years have made it possible to estimate tree canopy heights using satellite imagery alone making it possible to finally add trees to the map. The data isn't perfect, but it's within +/- 3 meters of so. Good enough to give a general idea for any location on Earth. Happy to answer…

    2024 · shademap.app · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Hey all, You've probably seen projects that add objects to an image from a style or text prompt, like InteriorAI (levelsio) and Adobe Firefly. The prevalent issue with these diffusion-based inpainting approaches is that they don't yet have great conditioning on lighting, perspective, and structure. You'll often get incorrect or generic shadows; warped-looking objects; and distorted backgrounds. What is Fill 3D? Fill 3D is an exploration on doing generative fill in 3D to render ultra-realistic results that harmonize with the background image, using industry-standard path tracing, akin to…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    A framework for 3D geospatial visualization in the browser - UDST/vizicities

    2016 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11
    MapScroll▲109

    Hi HN, I built this after getting frustrated trying to map out things like “Ancient mayan ruins” or “James Bond movie locations” on Google "My" Maps. You basically have to drop pins manually, hunt down photos, copy links, it’s slow and never feels like an actual story. With MapScroll, you just type something like “Marco Polo’s route” or “forgotten WWII sites in France”, and it geocodes, grabs images + articles, and plots everything into a shareable story map. Each marker comes with a little gallery and sources tied to your prompt. You can also refine the first draft which AI creates before…

    2025 · mapscroll.ai · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Immersive video conferencing portal uniting cities

    2021 · videowindow.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13SV
  14. 14

    Browse and create 360° panoramas on your iPhone or Android

    2015 · itunes.apple.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15AC

    Hello HN. This is a project me and some friends built at university in 2017. It was originally built in a rush, but we've added a few improvements over the years. It's a fun game to host at a demoparty and project on a big screen - We did that at Instanssi many times. The implementation is still rough, and suffers from the fast pace of the modern web - The frontend is likely very outdated, and the backend is built with Vapor 2 and Swift 3.1, both no longer supported. You can host this yourself, but it might be a bit of a pain to set up. The WebSocket protocol is fairly trivial to work out…

    2022 · pixel.vkoskiv.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    I just redesigned an old (1 year) project and would appreciate any feedback. The site has no real purpose other than allowing you to explore the large amount of imagery gathered by Google. You can make it less random by choosing a country, or indeed any geographical area (cities etc.) http://www.mapcrunch.com Thanks

    2011 · mapcrunch.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17SL

    Inspired by All Text in NYC (https://alltext.nyc) by Yufeng Zhang I thought I would replicate something similar for London. A searchable tool that lets you explore text captured across Google Street View imagery in London; shop signs, posters, graffiti, van numbers etc

    Nov 2025 · london.publicinsights.uk · its alternatives →

  18. 18
    MapBoard▲128

    Map + whiteboard ~ real time multi user doodle map

    2018 · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    An interactive tour of four Seattle landmarks reconstructed using photogrammetry and presented in 3D with dynamically-projected photographic textures.

    2022 · arcsineimaging.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    I'm enthralled with using pen plotters to make generative art. Last August at SIGGRAPH, I built an interactive experience for others to see how code can be used to make visual art. The linked blog post is my trials and tribulations of linking a MIDI controller to one of these algorithms and sending its output to a plotter, so that people may witness the end-to-end experience.

    2024 · lostpixels.io · its alternatives →

  21. 21MC
  22. 22G3

    I made a web app to generate 3D models of real places on earth from land cover and elevation data. Click anywhere on the map to get a polygon, and then click "generate". It should work at most scales, but if your watershed or region selection is too large, the result can be less exciting because it's so flat. As a warning, the 3D models can sometimes be too much for my phone. It's nicer on desktop. I'm still working better on mobile support. The land cover data I'm using gives a cool effect, but at some point I'd like to add in global imagery and clouds. The backend is a Python thread…

    2025 · topography.jessekv.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23MA

    Hello HN! I’m excited to share this open-source community mashup showing the power and possibility of combining 3D Gaussian splat scans with traditional mesh-based 3D tiles maps in the browser. As you've probably seen on HN a bunch lately, Gaussian splats are a new method to allow custom 3D scans of scenes and objects [1] and Google Maps 3D Tiles API are the same 3D buildings and street views your familiar with in Google Earth or Google Maps, and recently they’ve been made available for inclusion in web apps. Combining splats + 3d map mixes highly detailed real-world custom micro-scans with…

    2024 · maps-and-splats.glitch.me · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Create interactive Google Street View hyper-lapse animations

    2014 · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →