Paint the Earth on a live, interactive globe (collaborative art.)
Details
- External ID
- 48802818
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Paint the Earth on a live, interactive globe (collaborative art.)
- Website domain
- earth.tattoo
- Launched
- July 6, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 20
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7162485065710872
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Earth.tattoo divides the earth into 510 million 16x16 pixel "tiles" that you can own and paint as you like. You can claim one free tile per hour.
Enrichment
- Theme
- specialized visual art and design tools
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- —
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- collaborative interactive globe painting
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial The 3D globe visualization and tile selection UI is straightforward, but managing real-time collaborative pixel painting across 510 million persistent tiles requires high-throughput spatial indexing and efficient streaming infrastructure.
What it would actually take: The architecture requires a 3D frontend (Three.js/Cesium) coupled with a scalable spatial database (e.g., PostGIS or custom quadtree storage) to handle 510 million tiles. Real-time updates demand an optimized WebSocket or Redis pub/sub layer along with dynamic raster/vector tile generation pipeline to avoid collapsing under simultaneous user writes.
Discussion
14 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Million Dollar Homepage, Reddit Place variant, wplace.live, Free drawing sites
Concerns raised: Vandalism and griefing without pricing protection, Misuse with forbidden symbols/problematic content moderation, World too large, hard to find where to draw, Blocks are too small, Unclear if people will pay for tiles
Feature requests: Undo shortcuts (ctrl+z) for pixel-level changes, Wayback/historical mode to view unmodified art, Heatmap showing activity hotspots in past 24 hours, Start with geolocation-based focus on user's local area, Minimum price proportional to tile contiguity value
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 100 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #34 of 101 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 250 days after the earliest competitor.
- Pixel Space Canvas · ph · 2026-09-29 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Message to Mars · ph · 2026-09-17 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- The Last Website · ph · 2026-09-30 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Tattoo Stencil Maker by TattooDesignPro · ph · 2026-09-28 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- WallStock · ph · 2026-09-28 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Pixel Lord · ph · 2026-09-14 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Tattoo Pain Scale Map · ph · 2026-09-26 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- AI Tattoo Generator · ph · 2026-09-20 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.42
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.