Drive through cities in the browser while listening to local radio stations | Hacker News Reader

Drive through cities in the browser while listening to local radio stations

driveandlisten.herokuapp.com

804 pointsherval171 comments

I absolutely love this.

As the creator of Dream Catalogue once wrote:

"I spent a lot of 2013 listening to spacey drum & bass mixes while watching Hong Kong and Tokyo night driving videos on YouTube and drinking beer, just because the combination of it all created such a weird feeling I have never experienced before."

I love these kinds of videos. Pairing it with a local radio station gives me the kind of feeling that you get whenever you first arrive in a new city.

You're gawking out of the window of the taxi/bus/train as the city and landscape goes whizzing past. Just drinking it allll in

In those moments you feel there is a whole world of opportunity that awaits you. You don't know what you'll find there. You get lost going over the possibilities that await. Will you find friendship? Opportunities? Love? Enlightenment? Anything could happen.

But in that moment, those are all just possibilities. So you sit. And you watch. And you think.

And then you snap back to reality when you reach your destination. You step outside, are briefly assaulted by the heat and moisture - or lack of it - and sometimes you see or smell things you've never encountered before.

You blink, breathe in, and take your first steps in this new place that you will be calling home.

In case the author reads this, it would be nice to have a 'night mode' option.

Yeah, this would be my feature request as well. If there are decent quality of night drives available for the city it would be nice to be able to switch to those.

And night+rain mode.

Yep! Definitely that for London :)

When I eventually leave London, I feel like some of my favourite memories are going to be sitting in the back of an Uber driving from Sth to Nth London at 5am.

They're likely just pulling the video from youtube in which case they're limited to the videos available for that city that have been uploaded by other users, so that may not always be possible for all cities. They're might also be differences like the route taken.

Go to Oslo, seems like it's night and snowing there..

"Google Street View is fantastic. You can go anywhere, anywhere in the world. Where shall I go? My house."

TIL about Dream Catalogue. I've been browsing through so many albums I would have never otherwise have heard about. Thanks a ton. Love this site

I had a related idea of hooking up an exercise bicycle to Google Street view and some VR goggles. Play street noise from destination city streamed from YouTube and local music, but you determine which way you go by actually riding the bicycle.

And a variable fan depending on your speed? :P

In case you need a final push, that is a great product idea; Do It! Combine it with street maps offered by city tourism and i have everything i need for a virtual city tour.

I couldn't agree more with you. This site actually made me cry and I don't know why!! LoL! It's brilliant.

BIG ups to the developer. And I would GLADLY pay to not have ads and popups in this experience so do consider a paid or subscription model.

Thanks!

Beautifully said. As someone who spent a couple years traveling the world, this resonates.

I am one of the people who misses home country, this project made me escape to my country roads especially during pandemic and gave me a homely feeling. I am also equally embarrassed to see the worst roads and terrible drivers in India(compared to any other cities).

I sometimes reflect on this phenomenon, a fleeting feeling on a familiar commute will give me goosebumps and transport me back to when I first was interviewing in this new location and looking out the window in utter astonishment and anticipation of exactly what you mentioned, the wonderment of what direction my life may take if I land the job and live here. You have a great way with words.

If you like this check out https://pluto.tv/live-tv/slow-tv. You don't get to choose the location or music, but it is similar. Pluto has a lot of other great channels too. There's over 100, all free.

Coincidentally, I'm updating the companion Spotify playlist for my online port of the 2005 procedural driving demo, Drivey:

https://rezmason.github.io/drivey

Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4ukrs3cTKjTbLoFcxqssXi

Slightly different vibe, equally free of charge, feedback always welcome :)

This is a fantastic piece of work.

Have you considered the ability to 'share' a spotify playlist & the users are given a random playlist from the global list each time they load?

That isn't to say I didn't enjoy the playlist you've provided!

Thank you! To be honest, the Spotify playlist was a kind of afterthought until recently. I spent part of this morning trying to embed a Spotify widget in the UI as a sort of stereo, but iframes don't easily resize their content the way the rest of the UI does.

Spotify does have a developer API that might allow what you're talking about, but I haven't looked too closely at it yet.

You could just put a stereo or such in the dashboard in keeping with the UI and play music in the background with nothing spotify visible and just have a keypress trigger switching the playlist or something.

Either way, the app is awesome with or without any music features - it's not exactly a hassle to play my own music! Only mentioned it due to the theme of OP.

Will keep watching updates!

Wow this is beautiful

I love this. Something about procedural generation delights me even if I know what's behind the curtain.

That's really cool, thank you for sharing that! Only feedback I have is that it feels like I'm going around in circles somehow. I guess it's because the frequency of right turns seems to be a lot higher than the frequency of left turns, for some reason. Not sure if this is just my imagination, but after 2 minutes of watching it I started feeling like I'm going in circles.

If you click the "camera" option a few times you get to satellite view - and you are correct, it seems we are driving in a big loop

This is really inspiring! Thanks for sharing and making it open source so we can all learn.

Yo this is dope.

What I find interesting is that cities everywhere seem to be roughly at the same level of development. The GDP of a country may be different, GDP per capita might be wildly different, but in most places on earth there are still roads, cars or motorcycles at least, reasonably well built structures, and so on.

If you look at the different architecture, you might be able to figure out roughly where you are, but you would also be able to tell WHEN you with similar accuracy.

The internet has sped up pretty much everything in modern society. I would say in the last 20 years, it wasn't the earth shaping the internet, it was the internet shaping the earth.

20 years ago, and even 40 years ago, it was also true that urban communities arguably[1] had more in common with each other than with their surrounding rural communities.

(the future was there, it just wasn't evenly distributed yet)

[1] Jane Jacob's "The Economy of Cities" argues that cities resembling each other has been true for at least 5'000 years.

If travel has taught me one thing is that singular measures of wealth such as GDP have very little correspondence to what is actually going in a nation's development, and points out the folly in chasing profit as many people's idea of career and lifestyle progress.

GDP gives nominal values; PPP attempts to give a better estimate of actual goods and services available.

I don't think so. For one, this is probably only displaying the capital cities and main roads. These are usually in pretty good shape everywhere. Infrastructure is more than roads: Internet, Metro, Airports, Wireless Internet, Roads for remote neighborhoods, bridges, etc...

While the US has a stupidly bad infrastructure in its main cities (no public transportation, airports are worse than third-world, mobile internet sucks, etc...) it's way ahead in terms of infrastructure for the neighborhoods.

Maybe it depends on which cities you pick. Singapore looks a lot more developed than Berlin (PS: I love both cities)

Yup this was one of my lessons from traveling. Was impressed at how nice these so-called "poorer" countries looked. I grew up in the U.S., and despite our high GDP most of the country looks fairly unremarkable from a development perspective. Even in our wealthiest cities, there are areas that look like third world countries (eg. Skid Row).

This is amazing. I love going through the youtube videos like this where its just people driving through a city. Feels like traveling, and if you are traveling to a city it can be a good way to familiarize yourself with it before you go.

The addition of the radio station just makes it feel that much more immersive.

Thank you for making this. I didn't realize how much I miss visiting London. If the creator is reading this - can you please add Dublin as well? If this is on github, happy to send a PR with this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX8bD5tpQWQ

What is the London radio sound to your ears? I would have thought Radio 3 or 4 would be iconic London but they're not on here!

https://radiotoday.co.uk/2020/02/rajar-q4-2019-london-and-na... suggests Radio 4, Radio 2, Capital FM, in that order

I have little to no experience with London radio, I spend most of time chatting with cabbies when I’m in a black cab. What I miss is seeing pub, pret, pub, pret, pub, pret :)

Kiss FM or Capital FM. I can still hear the jingle for capital FM! or perhaps LBC 97.3

Oh god, homesickness is rife, it's going through areas I used to frequent really often too. Even passed my old apartment and workplace at one point (I cheated and looked at the video source).

The Stockholm one seems randomised, but the London one only has one video, quite odd.

Apparently the author read this and reacted quickly, or this is a nice coincidence - Dublin was added about an hour after your comment, with the video you suggested: https://twitter.com/driveandlisten/status/127301385524606157...

Wonderful! I love that city so much, it feels like home away from home every time I visit. Sláinte!

To piggyback off of this, if by chance the author sees this and is still looking to add cities, maybe Austin would be an easy addition? KUTX streams their “Austin Music Experience” channel https://play.kutx.org/index.html as well as the stations you’d get on the radio, and there’s some videos that might fit (mostly downtown, but still) https://youtu.be/VKouHxAtC5E

This is an absolutely fabulous idea, great job.

Some observations:

* I chose 'Berlin' and when I selected the 'street noise' it played music. Viewing the video, I see the YouTube video has music rather than street sounds, so selecting videos that have actual street sounds might be good.

* I would like a 'night' mode where I can toggle whether I'm driving around in the day or night. Bonus points for different weather (I would prefer rain or overcast personally).

* It would be great to have a 360/VR video to be able to scroll around or use in VR.

Do you run into any licensing issues with the radio or video? I didn't see any free/libre licenses on the YouTube videos so presumably you're a take-down notice away from not being able to use these videos.

>It would be great to have a 360/VR video to be able to scroll around or use in VR.

Having this in VR with a proper set of headphones on would be sublime.

Really enjoyed this as is, although it has made me very homesick.

> I didn't see any free/libre licenses on the YouTube videos so presumably you're a take-down notice away from not being able to use these videos.

If the videos are being embedded from YouTube (as they appear to be), then there are potentially two different concerns here:

1. Whether the video owner is okay with their content being shown on another site. This is already controllable via whether they choose to enable embedding or not, and the YouTube TOS talk about licensing for embeds, so this seems okay. https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms#fb098d3e34

2. Whether the embedding is being done in compliance with the YouTube API Terms of Service. There could be some issues here. https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/api-services-ter... ; https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/required-minimum... (see "Overlays" section).

I think this gets at the licensing issues and the "non-commercial" sentiment of that type of usage, whether it's explicitly CC-NC or otherwise.

Notice the "Buy me a coffee" link. Is this considered "for profit" now? This person is asking for donations and is effectively monetizing the videos, at least is a very weak sense.

And thanks for that 'overlays' link. It's clear these types of sites only exist at the discretion of YouTube. That's unfortunate and all the more reason to try to enrich the commons with more CC0/CC-BY/CC-BY-SA work.

I think this is a great way to teach young children about the world in a way that resonates with them. So much of their observation of the outside world occurs from the seat of a car (for better or for worse). It's a big part of their universe; they often pay such close attention to every little detail, so the differences around the world should be immediately obvious to them.

I love finding ways to talk about the world with my son, when i travel for work i get a small souvenir just so i have a physical object we can talk about from the place i’ve just been. Regarding your comment and after watching the London video it reminded me of our first trip as a family to London. We took electric black taxis all around the different sites in central London. I hadn’t planned on doing that but we had a tough stretch on the central line so the taxi was a welcome upgrade. Anyway my son loved the taxi, it is silent, has huge windows, glass roof and you really get to see London from inside. We did day time trips and ones at night. It was so good i tried to game taxi ranks to keep getting them. I think its good for children to have a worldview which is easy with youtube today.

There's a distinct lack of rap music stations. I thought you would at least have the big ones like WQHT/Hot 97 (NYC) and KPWR/Power 106 (LA). There are many other major stations around the world as well, like BBC Radio 1Xtra and Rinse FM in UK.

Could you do more to add rap stations? I love the site, just think it still has a few oversights and blind spots for some cities and genres.

https://www.cision.com/us/2014/08/top-10-hip-hop-and-rb-radi...

cool experience, but small gripe : the grimier parts of Los Angeles are a million times more fun to drive through than a loop through 'the Hills', Malibu, or Beverly Hills.

I'd hate foreigners to think that's what LA is like, not by a long shot. Driving through LA is a lot more like driving through a huge industrial area with a small metropolitan ultra-lux oasis every few miles.

If someone wants to get the real feel for Los Angeles, in my opinion of course, jump on Google Earth, start at El Segundo and Crenshaw Blvd. and 'drive' south until you hit San Pedro.

THAT's a true Los Angeles drive. (imo, of course).

For an even fuller 'California' experience, drive up PCH afterwards and have dinner on the coast somewhere nice.

> THAT's a true Los Angeles drive. (imo, of course).

It's also wholly outside the Los Angeles city limits

So are Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, but I'd argue most would call them LA.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Los+Angeles,+CA/@34.010126...

They're part of LA County.

Coming from Poland, a 30 minute drive through a random industrial area in LA to pick up the keys to an AirBnb days was one of my most horrifying moments in life.

That was my first time in the US. Getting behind the wheel to drive through the dark, narrow streets at dusk only brought memories from crime TV shows, where bad things are guaranteed in such places.

To my relief, only good things happened :)

One of the most striking things for me, as a Brit, was DTLA. There are streets of prestine opulence, fountains and statues, then on the opposite side of the same street tents and broken down shops that seem to be permanently closed and graffiti'd.

Also the crazy people yelling.

It's just jarring how close the inequality is, it can be both extremes on the same street.

Click the city name a few times to cycle through alternate videos the creator selected. Found one for LA that was more in line with what you described.

I'm already hooked. It's wonderful revisiting old travels and dreaming about life elsewhere. I've confirmed I have a preference for places where people drive fast, just a little crazy, and sunny and hot.

My requests would be: Bali, Jakarta, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Cairo, Adis Ababa, Lima, Bogota, Trinidad, Kingston, Puerto Rico

Incidentally, "drive fast, just a little crazy, and sunny and hot." sounds like hell to me :-)

I'm originally from a country where people drive slow, never crazy and it's dark and cold. I also love places where people drive fast, a little bit crazy and it's sunny and warm. Guess you want what you didn't have growing up?

This is such a simple yet great idea, I love it. It was featured on Product Hunt as well: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/drive-listen

This is brilliant. Reminds me of the stressful time I had in Paris trying to drive with all of the crazy motorcyclists darting around all over the place. Also, good job on providing KEXP radio in Seattle.

Neat! But I can't say I'm a fan of the analog TV static. That's mixing the metaphor.

Reminds me of the Truck Simulator games that had support for streaming local stations over Internet radio in game.

A lot of FM radios produce noise when scanning between stations.

Yes, but a different noise.

Wow, this is just wonderful. Such a simple idea so well executed! Having just shown it around at the office, the consensus is that it's fascinating and very engaging. I hope more videos are forthcoming.

A minor fix would be to prevent the audio tracks from restarting at the beginning. Instead, start from a random point, or resume from the last location. Considering the video appears to be crowdsourced, it might also help to include a "suggest video" function.

The Havana stream is pretty cool if you're into classic cars. Quite a few just on the streets, since the embargo basically stopped US car imports after 1960.

My first thought was "I absolutely love this" and sure enough it's the first comment that pops up.

I remember a 24/7 livestream that ran on Youtube some time ago that only played drive-throughs of Tokyo videos while cheesy 80s japanese city-pop played in the background. It was pretty fun, but of course it was shut down, probably because of copyright. I miss it, but this is a valid replacement. Thank you!

There is something about this that evokes a real visceral feeling from deep within, a familiar feeling of being in a new place and taking it all in.

With that being said, I hope I never have to give up this flexible remote working setup we all find ourselves in. Not until driving is more automated and efficient. The feelings of being in virtual traffic still makes me cringe and irrationally angry when someone cuts me off.

Holy Jesus, this is amazing. It took me back to moments in my life but I just going through the stories and the sounds of the radio.

Incredible artwork.

EDIT: I did notice that some switches didn't correctly switch some of the channels. I was in Antalya and definitely listening to some American channel and the same for Bombay because I am confident no one there talks about possums and drywall :D

EDIT 2: Also, lots of Turkey. Loving it.

Please consider adding KCRW to Los Angeles.

https://www.kcrw.com/

I think its already in there

https://puu.sh/FXajT/bce4ecc81c.png

This is incredible!

I noticed that if I try to change stations in Seoul (track forward or track backwards) that part of the interface freezes with a "loading..." message.

Tiny bug, probably easy fix.

Such a great experience overall. If you plan to keep building it up, would love even more cities, even "boring" ones, if adding them could be pretty well automated. Synching the time of the video to the time in that place would be an amazing feature, but would probably involve a lot of tagging, and not sure if there's that much content out there. Keyboard shortcuts, including one to hop to a new random city would be nice. (I guess ctrl+r technically does that already...).

EDIT: There's a whole genre of 4k city flyover videos with drones on YouTube too. I know it's off concept, but that might be worth remixing in a similar way (assuming you could give credit and get traffic back to the original producers).

Great stuff.

Same for Singapore -- radio didn't work. But I live here, and I absolutely despise the radio here, incredibly insipid, so it's fine that it was muted.

For background atmospherics, I sometimes enjoy listening to emergency scanner traffic on some of the sites that aggregate it from the big cities. Amazing to listen to the dispatcher flows in Chicago, for example. Non stop.

I love this! Really captures that feeling of arriving in a new country for the first time, sitting in a cab on the way to your hostel/hotel with the driver playing the local radio.

My only feedback would be that the white noise in between radio station and city changes is jarringly loud, and I'd love to see more locations!

Logged in to say kudos. This is a fantastic idea. Driving around in Antalya now, and I am transported mentally.

Street noise is way too loud.

In some cities. Sound volume normalization/tweaking is needed.

Oh my goodness, it even has the UPS trucks and random Uber/Lyft drivers blocking the driving lanes in San Francisco. That's what I call realism, it's bringing back PTSD for me.

Fantastic project, works really well, almost too well!

Love it! Really neat.

Even if landscapes are very urban, I like this feeling of driving that I don't really have anymore since I'm living in Paris. I'm often playing to Euro Truck Simulator just for getting out of the narrow streets and watching the horizon.

If you like videos like this, I recommend you this YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK3HAx-5XIRrWzpFziOQY0Q The highways, the acceleration effect, and the acid jazz music will give Ridge Racer memories to some of you!

Super cool! If by some chance the creator of this is reading these comments, The Toronto drive brought up "WNED Classical" which isn't a Toronto station, it's out of Buffalo.

I guess that's even more realistic then. Can you actually hear the Buffalo station in Toronto?

I used to love getting the US ATCS tv stations out of NY state. Universal Sports was awesome, 24hr a day amateur sports, then NBC bought it and I moved.

For a time, free OTA Universal Sports was probably my most watched channel. Then, as you say, NBC bought it and most of the content moved to cable channels or behind online paywalls at NBCSports. The NBC Olympic Channel captures the vibe of the old station pretty well if it's available to you. I know YouTube TV has it.

hmmm, yes, good point, I think you can.

I'm personally very fond of train cab ride videos (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw9qiV7XlFs ). You can find these on YouTube with music as well, but pairing them with local radio (in this case one of the SWR channels https://www.swr.de/ ) could also be nice in this project as a non-car option.

A small recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22972812

That's a shame.

I'd like to see some sort of mash-up between it and radio.garden.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23477771

Driving in India seems so challenging compared to any other country :D. Being an Indian I think driving any where else will be so much more boring.

I just pulled myself from the rabbit hole of Google vs. Zero Hedge to discover this. It brings back so many good memories of countless road trips.... Reminds me that much of the world ain’t so bad, and someone just made it a little bit better. Thank you Erkam. [1]

[1]: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/erkam

What this has scammy popups when browsing on a phone?

Agreed. I got a popup about kitchen installation. What's happening with this app on mobile?

Love this, but please get rid of the pop-up malware. I am on Android and a pop-up appeared saying my OS is out of date and that there were updates to install. I could not dismiss it and it appears to hijack my screen and attempt to redirect me to norton security or something. Not sure if the video player is response for this or what is going on, but it felt very violative.

If you can't dismiss it, then you have malware on your phone. A website cannot hijack your screen in a way you can't simply back out of.

I was really surprised to get a big full screen ad as well.

This is absolutely fantastic! I hope there will be a way to adjust video quality. It'd be pretty cool if there were a picture in picture trigger too. https://css-tricks.com/an-introduction-to-the-picture-in-pic...

Great idea! I think you can you can add driving on the highways to the list, it looks quite nice when combined with a radio. Here's an example of something similar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39JXpMMmAp4

This is absolutely incredible. I will not be working all day because of this. Neat seeing the different forms of civic infrastructure around the world. E.g. in Spain, they have traffic lights that blink on green when about to change. Could be helpful. Also funny seeing the different cultures of driving aggression

I like to fly X-Plane’s Cessna with radio.garden open in background, tuning it to nearby city on the ground below.

This is perfect to leave on the television.

One suggestion: looks like the radio stations for Beijing could use some alternatives. I only see 2 options, 1 for "Alxa Mongolian" and "BinChow". BinChow appears to be a Taiwanese radio station, and the Mongolian one appears to be speaking Mongolian.

Wow, this is really amazing! And really cool idea and experience to just put on TV at home and chill.

But I always wanted to just get into the mood of Paris or NY or Havana or Tokyo when I hop on bicycle or motorcycle. And would love if You had a version with just stations and list of cities like this.

That's great, really cool!

I wonder why it's deployed to Heroku. Isn't it just static html/css/js?

How are they embedding youtube videos without any of the youtube branding? I've never (to my knowledge) seen this sort of thing before. Isn't the youtube team pretty relentless at ensuring their logo is in the bottom right corner no matter where you embed the video?

If you take a look at page source, you'll see that the YouTube videos are embedded with a few extra parameters that make the interface (what sometimes used to be called the "chrome" before the browser with this name became popular...) a lot more seamless.

Example video URL (the controls=0, showinfo=0 and playsinline=1 play a role in this):

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ceEE_oYuzS4?autoplay=1&mute=1&...

So good! It's a more immersive version of radio.garden that popped up this week on HN.

There was a similar website trending here last month, where the videos involved walking (instead of driving). Does anyone remember it / can anyone point me to it?

Unrelated: How do you search for old HN posts when you can't think of exact keywords?

google:

news.ycombinator.com your search term

Also if you google for hn search there are some sites.

a few clips that could be used for Bucharest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQCRwK2XEzE , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YseGSV0l6jQ , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jenT0KTi7pw , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQCRwK2XEzE

This is great - wonderful sense of presence, especially with the road noise mixed in. It would be really fantastic in VR.

(Also, 50 different cities and a couple stations for each? That's no small amount of work!)

This is really neat, though I wish I could listen to AM / news channels rather than just FM which tends to be more music.

Also, I think the bike/moped driver in Wuhan runs a red about a minute or two in!

I wish this didn’t have pop ups to download and install things. That gives it a phishing vibe. Which prevents me from sharing it with people. Who will likely install whatever this promotes.

This is so cool! Feature request: a toggle to hide the right bar.

The toggle is already there - click top right on the eye logo

This is awesome.

My first thought was to visit all the places I've traveled to that I love.

Enjoying it a lot.

Feels like being in a local taxi again, and it's jogging all kinds of memories, what a great experience.

Really kool, i can just relax, watch and listen especially when i want to get some positive distractions.Great selection of cities and radio stations.

This makes me smile so much, thanks for doing this.

Going into fullscreen(F11) causes the video to zoom(i would say 50%) and causes a degradation in quality and a loss of field of view.

Came here to type this. Mine zoomed in much farther, but I would have liked to eliminate the browser mess.

Otherwise, this is very, very cool. Thank you to the author.

A side question:One thing I'd love to see is a live camera in a marshalling yard. Any chance we have one already?

Ok, consider me impressed! I really like the simplicity, creativity, and execution. Good Job.

I would love to see this for every city.

At least Madrid is not Madrid. It's actually Paracuellos del Jarama, a village (20k pop.) ~20km east of Madrid.

I tried to get out of the car and steal another one. Then I realized this is not GTA Vice city...

Congratulations for the great work!

Click the city repeatedly to get alternate scenes for a given city (didn't see anyone else mention that yet).

I clicked play on mobile and I immediately got an advertisement to get a quote for a new kitchen?

Immediately closed. Disappointing.

Got the same here. Something is up on mobile.

Same here, but on desktop. Every Radio channel in Berlin started with an advertisement for dental service.

Absolutely love this. Great opportunity to see again all those places visited in the past. It feels so real.

This is neat, but I find it irresponsible they don't blur faces and license plates.

Once upon a time you asked people for their permission before you took their photo; much less before you posted it somewhere for the world to see.

EDIT: The videos are from popular Youtube videos, so the footage is already public (though I still can't help feeling like it's propagating a problem).

Lovely. I especially like the Stockholm dystopian winter drive. Pick Star FM for 80's tunes.

This is amazing! Fantastic work! Can we please please please get a VR option? Pretty please?

I find it absolutely fantastic that Wuhan is in the list of cities! Who would have thought.

Full screen seems to broken. F11 doesn't work for that. Any idea how to full screen?

This is so cool. I just loaded up the Seattle one to get a feel for the city pre-COVID.

Nice! I moved ~5years ago to the US from Moscow - was nice to get back virtually :)

amazing, love it. This is exactly the kind of thing I want to play on a big TV, or project onto a full wall, and leave going in the background.

A map would be awesome, but I realize that data probably isn't easily available.

The Mumbai video has a map

So the videos are repeated over and over and radio stations are played live.

Feels kinda relaxing in these tough times. Thank you for creating this :-)

This is really brilliant! Reminds me of my time traveling in those cities.

congrats. Just one thing: in Barcelona the official language is Catalan, so if you look for a local station try not to put "Latino" music (that's latino america -> south America

Why does my Firefox focus block thousands of connections on this site?

Didn't expect to see my city here (Yekaterinburg)

Beautiful project, love this!

It's really awesome, congrats!

However, at least for European cities you'll run into trouble regarding GDPR, if you do not mask out the license plates [1]:

"An easy example of information that could be used to indirectly identify someone is an individual’s license plate number. The police (a third party) can quickly match a name to a license plate number."

At least here in Germany, there has been one case where a Youtuber got a fine because of showing license plates in his videos [2]. And because your website is accessible in the European Union, these rules apply.

[1]: https://gdpr.eu/eu-gdpr-personal-data/

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFBrgJIkDwI [Obv. german source, sorry]

Such a nice reminder of the simplicity and beauty of the web

This is amazing. Where does the driving footage come from?

Video sources are linked on the right. Seems to be random youtube videos.

Better yet, mute those local stations and put some Moby on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBIRHlKYG2o

Makes me want to do a version where the video has a filter applied to it to make it more ethereal..

Any chance you could add the radio station m2o for Rome?

Nitpick: the city is Honolulu. Hawaii is the state.

Fantastic! Would love to see Bengaluru, India :)

Lol with all the traffic?

Because of COVID-19, I assume there should be less traffic. With traffic it will give taste of 3D driving experience of Bengaluru to all our global friends :)

A lot of these look like it'd be hard to pick out the location from without a bit of time to look around, but then I clicked on Switzerland.

Great job! Are the radio stations live?

Seems so. I pulled up a radio stations stream in NYC and they were playing the same song.

My brain really needed this. Thank you!

Didn't see anything in Africa?

That was quite pronounced. Of the 7, only one wasn't featured: Africa. Difficult to make any conclusion on that, but it's hard to ignore

This site is using videos pulled from Youtube. The lack of African cities most likely results from few available options. Certainly biases could play a role but a more charitable view is simply that those videos don't exist or are harder to find.

This is so fun. Add more cities! :D

This is really unique

Amazing idea!

This is amazing !! thank you for creating it

that’s really cool. nice job

brilliant

I just tried Wuhan

This is brilliant

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