A new website that lets you paint over a world map with other users in real-time has taken the digital illustration community by storm.
Wplace is a collaborative pixel art platform that serves as a spiritual successor to Reddit’s r/Place April Fools’ Day experiments, placing time restrictions on drawing tools that motivate users to team up to complete large or complex paintings. While r/Place provided its users with a blank white pixel grid, Wplace is layered over an interactive canvas of a world map made up of four trillion pixels, according to the website’s launch trailer, making it feel like a mashup between Microsoft Paint and Google Maps.
Wplace also appears to be a permanent experience, unlike r/Place, which Reddit has only made available for a few days every time it revives the experiment. That said, it appears to be straining under the weight of its explosive popularity, limiting its availability.
The painting aspect of Wplace is made intentionally challenging — new users have a limited pool of 30 pixels that they can place, and regain one spent pixel every 30 seconds. Though the maximum pool size expands the more you draw, the recharge time remains the same. Those limitations mean that Wplace users either have to work extremely slowly and hope that nobody paints over their progress, or collaborate on large projects with help from other users.
That makes some of the expansive paintings that have been shared across social media all the more impressive. Gaming and fandom-related content seem especially popular: fans of the NBC TV series Hannibal have littered images and quotes all over Florence, Italy, which is the setting for some of season 3, while Las Vegas, USA, is covered in homages to the Fallout games. Wplace itself has some gamified aspects too, such as leaderboards that track which countries are painted with the most pixels and which country has the most users who are contributing to the global canvas.
The website has attracted more than a million users since Friday. Some functions are currently offline at the time of reporting; however, with Wplace saying that it’s “experiencing technical problems.” Existing users can add to the canvas, but new users are unable to create accounts, and the leaderboards feature isn’t displaying any information. It’s unclear when regular service will be restored, but for now you can still visit the website to scroll through all of the artwork that was placed over the weekend.
