The Strip

Reading the Main track brief, the first thing we thought of was Exquisite Corpse, the drawing game from the 1920s where you only see a sliver of the last person's work before adding your own. Every digital version of that game we'd seen had the same problem: everyone draws with a different hand, and the result ends up looking like nothing in particular. We weren't trying to invent something new. We wanted to fix the one thing that always made it look bad.

What it does

The Strip is one canvas that never ends. You don't pick where to draw --- you can only continue from the exact point the last person stopped. Before your stroke gets added, Reve restyles it to match a single fixed look, so a few hundred strangers drawing completely unrelated things still add up to something that reads as one piece instead of visual noise. There's a dashboard showing the strip growing hour by hour, a scrubber to replay the whole history from an empty canvas to right now, and a 3D mode that turns that timeline into a spiral you can fly through.

How we built it

Next.js on the frontend, Supabase for Postgres, storage, and realtime updates, Reve for the stylization step, Vercel for hosting. Everything reads from one table: each contribution has a position, a raw image, a stylized image, and a status. The 2D view, the dashboard, and the 3D mode are just three different ways of looking at that same table, and none of them waits on the others. That mattered more than we expected once things started breaking at 3am.

Challenges we ran into

Reve takes a few seconds to come back, which is long enough to kill the feeling of "I drew something and it's just there now." We show the raw stroke right away and crossfade to the styled version once Reve responds. If Reve fails, we keep the raw stroke and don't show an error --- most people never notice. 3D was messier. Loading textures for hundreds of images made everything stutter on anything that wasn't a recent laptop, so we cut it down to real textures for the closest few dozen contributions and fell back to flat color for the rest, using the dominant color Reve already gives us.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It works end to end, in 24 hours: draw, stylize, display, replay. The best moment wasn't planned. Someone scanned the QR code during testing, drew one line, and watched it show up in the strip a few seconds later while everyone was standing around.

What we learned

The rule about only continuing from one spot did more work than anything we built on top of it. Take that away and it's just a wall of unrelated drawings. Keep it, and people read the strip as one thing without anyone explaining why.

What's next

We'd want to try input types beyond drawing, replace the report button with something closer to real community moderation, and let the 3D mode become a space people can walk through instead of one they only fly past.

Built With

• css
• next.js
• postgresql
• react
• reve
• supabase
• tailwind
• three.js
• typescript
• webgl