Well you can use the canvas object in many different ways. Not only can you paste objects into it, but you can draw, and retrieve data from it.
If you were to treat one like a mini map, you could have an image already loaded into the object, and get positions from that. Like if rgbaAt(x,y)= black create object walltile at x,y*tile size.
You could use this to tell where your players "quadrant" currently is, and create objects accordingly.