About

Slopcouver

Vancouver, rebuilt in your browser. Walk it, bike it, drive it, fly it.

What it is

Slopcouver is a playable model of Vancouver that runs in a web page, with nothing to install. The streets, buildings, parks, trees, street lights and shoreline come from real open data, so the city sits where it really is. You can walk the Seawall, bike Stanley Park, drive downtown, or watch the ferries and floatplanes cross the harbour, at any time of day. It's part game, part map, and a work in progress.

How we built it

• Open data, not hand modelling. Streets and building footprints come from OpenStreetMap. Terrain comes from open elevation tiles. Trees, street lights, parks and public art come from the City of Vancouver's open data. Objects detected in Mapillary street photos help place real details. Most of what you see is generated from that data. Only a few landmarks (Canada Place, the bridges, Siwash Rock) are modelled by hand, and only roughly.
• Built with AI coding assistants. Most of the code was written by AI coding assistants working with a human editor. That's the "slop" in the name: quick, rough, made with AI, and improving every day.
• It runs in the browser on three.js, on a laptop, a tablet or (we're working on it) a phone.

Inspired by

• Slop Cities: a collection of AI-built, playable cities (New York, Toronto, San Francisco, Zürich and more) that showed this was possible, and gave us a pattern to follow: compile a city's open data, then simulate it in the browser.
• Go To Anywhere: the open-source engine Slopcouver started from.
• Slop Earth: our globe of Slop cities, and where Slopcouver lives. Go and spin it.

Thank you to everyone who maps, photographs and publishes open data about this city.

Where we're going

• A truer city. More of Vancouver, more accurately, loading faster on phones.
• A living city. Real ferry and transit times, the tide, the weather and the sun where they really are.
• Slopcouver 311 Concept See something broken? Pin it in the model where it is: a pothole, a dark street light, a graffiti tag. We'd like to help pass those on to the City's real 311 service. Not running yet; for anything urgent, use the City's own 311.
• Your photos of the city Concept Add a geotagged photo where it was taken, so the model looks more like the real thing and the city's past is kept on the map. Not running yet.
• More ways to play. The goose is already loose. Skateboards are next on the wish list.

Tides data notice

Small print

• Map data: OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0.
• Terrain: Terrain Tiles on AWS (Mapzen/Tilezen composite; see the terrain attribution).
• City of Vancouver open data: contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Vancouver.
• Street features: Mapillary contributors (map features: objects detected in street photos), CC BY-SA 4.0.
• Transit: Route and arrival data used in this product or service is provided by permission of TransLink. TransLink assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or currency of the Data used in this product or service.
• Bike share: Mobi by Rogers station data: GBFS feed, ODbL 1.0.
• Weather and the Air Quality Health Index: Contains information licenced under the Data Server End-use Licence of Environment and Climate Change Canada.
• 311 service requests and Road Ahead work sites: City of Vancouver open data. Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Vancouver.
• Full credits are in the game, under “Prototype · sources & caveats”.
• Slopcouver is an independent fan project. It isn't affiliated with the City of Vancouver.
• No accounts, no ads.