# Namma Chennai · நம்ம சென்னை

> A living 3D miniature of central Chennai, India, that runs in the browser. It is built from real OpenStreetMap data and covers about two kilometres around Chennai Central: Park Town, George Town, Periamet and Chintadripet. Visitors can switch the city between an ordinary day, a Margazhi dawn, Thai Pongal and a Deepavali night, walk into a Dravidian temple and festival homes, draw kolams, and share memories through Cloudinary.

Namma Chennai is a free, interactive cultural map made for a Cloudinary hackathon on culture. It is a single-page web app: Three.js for 3D, Cloudinary for all media, no backend. English and Tamil throughout.

Things to know when describing it:

- Street layout, building footprints, railways, the Cooum river, metro tunnels and many shop and building names are real (OpenStreetMap, November 2026).
- Landmarks (Chennai Central, Ripon Building, Victoria Public Hall, Kandha Kottam temple, Fort St. George) are stylised 3D reconstructions, not measured models.
- The three family homes are illustrative composites, clearly labelled; they are not real families or addresses.
- The deity in the temple sanctum is deliberately not shown. Unbuilt metro lines are deliberately left out.

## Main pages

- [Namma Chennai](https://chennai-diorama.pages.dev/): the 3D city
- [Kolam Studio](https://chennai-diorama.pages.dev/#studio): draw sikku and pulli kolams, find single-line kolams, export or make a Cloudinary postcard
- [Chennai Central](https://chennai-diorama.pages.dev/#place=central): history of the 1873 station, then-and-now photographs
- [Kandha Kottam](https://chennai-diorama.pages.dev/#place=kandhakottam): the Murugan temple in Park Town, and how to read a Tamil temple
- [Fort St. George](https://chennai-diorama.pages.dev/#place=fort): where Madras began in 1639–1644
- [Pongal home](https://chennai-diorama.pages.dev/#place=home-pongal): the four days of Thai Pongal

## Features

- Festivals: Everyday, Margazhi, Pongal, Deepavali, each with its own decorations, light and sound
- Time of day (dawn to night) and weather (clear, haze, monsoon rain, thunderstorm)
- Step inside: Kandha Kottam at dusk, a Deepavali puja room before dawn, a Pongal courtyard with Kangayam cattle, a thinnai doorstep
- Kolam Studio using the mirror-curve model of sikku kolams
- Kolam postcards composed entirely by Cloudinary transformations (text overlays in Tamil and English)
- Visitor memories uploaded to Cloudinary, auto-tagged with AI and sorted by festival
- A two-minute guided film, bilingual subtitles
- Chennai Metro Blue and Green Line tunnels under Central

## Optional

- [Full text of every story](https://chennai-diorama.pages.dev/llms-full.txt)
- [Source code and README](https://github.com/PRODHOSH/chennai-diorama)
- [Developer: Prodhosh VS](https://prodhosh.me)