Experiment · Interactive Story
A sketchbook stroll through downtown Mineola.
Mineola is a small town up US 69 from Tyler, close to home for us, with a brick main street full of antique shops, a cheesecake bakery and an old theater. We wanted to see if we could turn a stroll down it into a web page: no camera crew, no illustrator, just street photos, AI, and a page you scroll to walk.
It worked well enough that we're showing it. It's still a prototype, and we say below exactly where it's rough.
Take the walk →Best on a laptop or a good phone connection.
How we made it
Walk the street, virtually
We picked a few blocks of downtown and pulled street-level photos at 29 stops along the route, looking left, ahead and right at each one.
Redraw every view
An AI image model redrew each photo as an ink drawing on paper, using one reference drawing so the whole set shares a hand. That made 87 drawings. We also tried an edge-tracing model and a video model that animates between frames; the plain sketchbook looked best.
Pick the keepers
A small picker tool laid every drawing out by stop, and we chose the ones that read well and kept the shops recognizable.
Stitch them together
The picks became two pieces: a walk down the middle of the street, and eight storefronts that bleed into each other like ink spreading on paper.
Make scrolling do the walking
On the page, your scroll drives the walk video frame by frame, captions come and go, and the storefronts swap with the ink effect drawn live in the browser. Phones get square drawings with the text underneath, and the walk as a run of still frames instead of a video, because iPhones won't show a video you scrub.
Try different ways between shops
The storefronts are still an open question, so the walk has a switch at the top: portal (the default, neighbors swing in like doorways), blend, strip, pan, and the original ink bleed. Pick the one you like.
What still needs polish
- It covers a few blocks, not the whole downtown.
- The drawings are AI's reading of the photos, so small details like window panes and lettering aren't exact.
- The captions are short first drafts written from the drawings. A real version would carry what the shops and the town want to say: hours, events, parking, history.
- The walk is heavy: about 16 MB of video on a laptop and 13 MB of frames on a phone. On a weak connection it takes a while before scrolling feels smooth.
- We haven't settled on one way to move between storefronts, which is why the switch is still there.
Why show you this? Because the same tools fit a business. A drawn tour of your shop or your street for the home page, a scroll-through story of how you build what you build, or a map of your town's stops for a chamber or a festival. A site can be more than a page of text with a phone number on it.
Got an idea like this?
Tell us about it. We build a free working demo first and write down an estimate before you pay anything.
The drawings were made by AI from Google Street View imagery. The shops shown are real businesses in downtown Mineola; they didn't commission this and aren't our clients. More of our work.