Random Google Street View | Hacker News Reader

Random Google Street View

randomstreetview.com

285 pointsO__________O93 comments

There is also a game (now a family of games) built around this concept, where you get a Street View location without seeing the map, and you have to figure out where you are based on what you can see.

https://geoguessr.com/

There are now geoguessr competitions, and the high level players learn to identify locations in seconds based on tiny details like utility pole designs. It’s incredible.

Here’s an example: https://youtu.be/Uvqc1_xl2h4

I started playing Geoguessr’s ranked duels a few months ago and if not for a family vacation to break me free, might have fully disappeared into the game.

Caught myself studying online guides to bollard color and shape by region, what road stripe patterns correspond with each country, the different shapes of the lettering of most major languages… etc.

It’s such a fun way to spend 15-30 minutes a day, and it’s quite easy to see improvement in your skill in a short time.

That being said, watching the pros can be a little discouraging because they’ll even have things like the ridge lines of mountain ranges memorized, it’s insane to watch.

Watching the pros made me realize they are just playing a game of memory.

How else could one play the game except using memory of places, cultures, etc? Seems like the whole thing is memory and could only ever be memory...

You can usually look around for street signs or shop fronts that include useful information (a website that ends in .nz for example).

That's still memory, knowing that .nz is associated to new zeland?

This game is mostly memory + deduction (you see a few signs which when combined, result in only one possible location)

I guess every piece of knowledge could be considered memory.

But I can see a difference between memorising the stripes on street furniture or which countries streetview has visited for the sake of playing such games and just knowing which direction the sun is to narrow down the hemisphere or having a little understanding of how the environment varies with latitude.

I particularly don't like the Geoguessr metas that are specific to Google Street View. In particular, expert Geoguessr players know about (1) which generation of imagery Google captured in which places (the quality gets higher over time), (2) which imaging artifacts are present from panorama stitching problems in which places (like "rifts" in the sky), (3) which kinds of cars were used where and what parts of the car you can see when you look down, and (4) which countries had a specific vehicle escort the Street View car.

I think the usefulness of these things is kind of sad because they are specifically about Google Street View rather than about the outside world. I would contrast that with something like utility poles, because while that's not exactly core cultural knowledge about a society, it's actually something that you would see for yourself if you were there. And it could potentially be interesting and useful in its own right. (For example, one might consider why particular countries adopted particular utility pole styles. Maybe they were faced with local insects or weather that damaged poles of a certain style, so they had to switch to a different kind?)

I suppose this happens in every competition. Its absolutely logical to try to game a system for a win.

Even if they've personally visited every country in the world, wouldn't they still be playing a game of memory too?

And a very good memory at that!! I’m pretty sure jeopardy is the same way.

How do the high scoring players of jeopardy do it? Do the memorize a book of facts or something? The mind boggles.

Trevor Rainbolt's skill at geoguessr is phenomenal: https://youtu.be/0p5Eb4OSZCs

> Vivaldi intensifies

I like City Guesser more. No account required and you have to guess the location from a video which I find a bit easier and more enjoyable.

https://virtualvacation.us/

thanks for sharing. that is really well done. monument guesser was great.

I could spend all day on that site! Those kinds of videos are going to be an invaluable archive 100 years from now!

I spent the following hour and a half after clicking on this on that site. Wow.

Being able to "experience" other locations, even in that shallow of a way, is really, really amazing.

A lot of fun. https://geotastic.net/ is also a good alternative.

Geotastic is the best alternative I know about.

I've always assumed these people (I see them come across my social media timelines periodically) are just trolling people because I've seen them guess where a place is based on nothing other than a patch of grass in less than 3 seconds.

I still don't see how that is even remotely possible.

Obviously “patch of grass” is going to be harder, but after a while you get good at noticing small details like the style of houses, the way the roads are marked, etc.

I’m by no means a pro but I went through a hyperfixation on Geoguessr YouTube videos so I started picking up the general architectural styles of Nordic houses for instance. Or the specific markings you can only find in Russia.

There’s also image artifacts which are only present in specific collection attempts. Most images from IIRC Ghana have a specific artifact and can easily narrow it down. There’s a few of these out there.

Almost all of those videos are real. You can in fact quite easily identify most areas down to a few 100s of km just from the surrounding nature. It takes some practice but it is for example very easy to learn which continent the nature is in. The videos you see on social media is also of course the best case out of 100s of games.

I play quite a bit, although I'm much more casual and generally just focus on the US. I find myself identifying areas based on foliage pretty frequently. They can be super localized and after you play a few hundred or thousand maps, you just start naturally associating different areas with different plants. I'm nowhere near good enough to guess in 3 seconds based off anything, but after a few months I find I can generally spawn, not move the camera, and correctly guess I'm in 1 of like 4 states. Depending on what's visible, I can often identify the correct state immediately, although pinpointing takes a lot more time. It's just like any game: repetition and practice makes perfect.

If the site is just using google api in the html source it's probably not too hard to extract the location from the javascript. A quick search shows there are browser scripts for that. But they could protect against by calling the streetview api from their server (if google allows that) and only serving the images to the user.

I spent many hours watching GeoWizard tracking down locations:

https://www.youtube.com/c/GeoWizard/playlists

There is something deeply sublime about peering into the places other people live, so remote from my own place, lives probably so different from mine. I ruminate on "other lives" I could have had instead — all those other people I could have called friends, neighbors....

If this intrigues you, please check out the work of artist Jon Rafman, who uses Google Earth as his medium:

https://9-eyes.com/

I had no idea what that meant, even though it makes perfect sense.

This is absolutely amazing. Far better than I was expecting.

I wonder the legality of this. Google owns those images, they have copyright. You can see the symbol when you zoom in on Google earth. Is he significantly modifying the images?

According to Google's guidelines https://www.google.com/intl/en-GB_ALL/permissions/geoguideli...

I interept it as "for non-commercial usage, give attribution to us and you're fine". I don't think Jon has given enough attribution though since some of the images do not have google watermark/copyright symbol (cropped?)

That was very interesting, right until it turned dark. Warning, somewhat graphic/NSFW

https://9-eyes.com/post/628925033219309568

You captured it so well for me. I sat on the porch for a good 15 minutes.

I screenshot a few because I didn't want to lose that moment of sublimeness.

There's a word for this feeling! From Wiktionary:

    sonder (uncountable noun)

        The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one's own, which they are constantly living despite one's personal lack of awareness of it.

Appears term was invented in the book “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” in 2012 to create new words for emotional expressions, concepts, etc:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32676647

If you enjoyed that feeling I suggest you look at http://astronaut.io which shows a few seconds of random Youtube videos with few views. Previously discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20432772

Interesting, though doesn't support Https for some reason.

You might like insecam.org as well. Similar principle in the end, but sort of live. And morally a bit harder because it's essentially spying. But for the curious..

I have got a snowy landscape in Akilliq, Iqaluit, NU, Canada, and looking at the shadow, it wasn't a Google Street View car. Someone was skiing to make the pictures. Wow.

http://randomstreetview.com/#11y8sk_-14t6sm_9t_1_-w

It’s a Street View Trekker backpack:

- https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/18/heres-googles-new-street-v...

Don’t see them listed on the program site anymore though:

- https://www.google.com/streetview/contacts-tools/

https://randomstreetview.com/#-e3f28_27m2ax_9j_1_2

Cool site. I wonder how it sustains itself though. Embedding Street View is expensive. $14 per 1000 views adds up fast. Surely the small ads don't make that much?

Very cool and well executed. After a few clicks I got, not a street, but a cool view of rocky sunrays from the middle of nowhere in Australia:

Simpsons Gap https://maps.app.goo.gl/kB5xtFyZJpwLKT4c8

In the middle of nowhere, but a game changer for Australia when the team attempting to lay a telegraph line through the Aussie outback found Simpsons gap almost by chance.

All I got was mundane countryside towns and roads all over Europe.

I got the exact same view as my third link.

I was going to ask if anyone got a place they recognise or have been to, but then you show one that Iv'e been to. Then again it is a popular tourist destination.

Here's a magical looking Scottish place it gave to me:

https://randomstreetview.com/#xvqf6_-3o1vn_74_a_5

I didn't realize it would have the gyro mode (?) active by default. That's actually pretty fun, or maybe I got an interesting neighborhood. :-) Going on my boredom cures list for sure.

BTW did you make this op? If so nice job!

You should definitely share some of the highlights of your boredom list. I’m always looking for more fun little things that the internet has to offer.

Someday in the future, we can post them to whatever forum type dealio is in vogue and reminisce about the good ole days when the web was open and free lol

Lol. For sure. It's in the profile, enjoy

Came here to plug Wander on Quest/Quest 2 as the best app / experience for this sort of thing hands down. Saved my sanity during the pandemic.

Cool, was just thinking how great this would be in VR. I'll give Wander a shot!

Show HN: Random Street View - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7130192 - Jan 2014 (166 comments)

Great site! I was surprised to see some aerial/drone imagery in the street view collection. For example, this in Ukraine:

https://randomstreetview.com/ua#sis3u_jvl2j_2j_5_-s

All these posts lately of "car society" is massively exemplified here. Seems like 99% of the properties built are made for cars. That's got to be like 2 billion houses made for cars. Good luck to those people that want to rid the world of cars.

Wait what? In a boat? https://randomstreetview.com/#11rvrf_-c284x_f_a_-r

Cool tool. Is it just me or is it a random location from a fixed list of places?

web console:

randomLocations.all.map((e) => e.formatted_address).sort()

tried it on multiple tabs, incognito, etc. and the result was the same.

This was one of the most crazy speedrun competitions I’ve ever seen, where they made a game out of this in co-op mode of geoguessr.

One person describes what the person sees, which the other can’t, klicks through the Google street view, and the other see’s the global map where they put hints for themselves and together they try to find out where they are.

https://youtu.be/aV2VuWleEeY

Interestingly it's mainly rural areas. I don't know why but I was expecting mostly more city views, because of all the intricate roads system in cities.

Yep, in sixteen views I got:

- one small village, basically a few houses along a road.

- one town in greenery.

- one instance of my phone entirely freezing up (this one is on FF, I guess).

Cities have dense road systems, but the vast majority of the surface area of roads is outside of cities.

Also the guy from Geowizard plays this game, and many more around maps. He even move his ass by going to places, leaving the comfort of being in front of the computer https://youtube.com/channel/UCW5OrUZ4SeUYkUg1XqcjFYA

Big fan of the straight line missions. Really cool how they make you experience common landscape from an entirely new perspective. Tom's a trooper.

And just dribbled a football across Britain in 21hours. Mad lad.

So annoying how Google has recently reduced the maximum distance you can move by clicking near the horizon. It used to be a lot more fun to explore random places when you could surf around an unfamiliar area at a reasonable speed.

In fact, it no longer makes much difference at all where you click, you creep along a few meters at a time.

First load and I got a Amish(?) dude transporting veggies. Was not disappointed!

https://randomstreetview.com/#pmlez_-1hz301_3w_c_-h

Is it really random or just a random set of prerecorded locations? After about 20 or so images I stopped seeing pictures so I refreshed the page - and got a location I had seen previously, which should be impossible.

I'd say the results are too consistently picturesque to be random.

The Netherlands has really nice bike lanes!

http://randomstreetview.com/#uxdmk_2n6ql_6r_a_5

Google should apply FILM on the transitions between photos

do you think we’ll be able to watch live video from random places on the globe, on television, before the end of this decade ? i’m not talking dull webcam footage. more like google street view but with video and maybe the ability to pan/tilt. if you have a dedicated tv channel that shows live random street videos from all over the world changing every minute or so…i’d watch.

I remember there being online directories of high-quality webcam feeds with pan/tilt 15+ years ago.

Can whole buildings be blurred out on street view? I randomly found this building and I thought it was a deep fog from down the road.

https://goo.gl/maps/QKsUTSTTy3yv6ezTA

Would be awesome if we could share the random view given to us, maybe by adding it to the URL as a parameter

Crazy comparing Europe to North America. In Europe it feels like you always see some structure. In North America a large number of the refreshes are empty roads and large empty lots.

It shows that we really dont have a land problem in North America. It's a permitting and transportation problem

I tried constraining it to the United States, and on the first click got a road I'd driven in Watertown, WI before, which was pretty funny. After about twenty more clicks I got another one extremely close to where I grew up.

I found various stunning shots on the italian island of Sardinia. Thanks!

Slightly annoying that the share button will only link back to the random viewer rather than give the real google coordinates. Is this something one must use the developer console to rip out?

Pretty much the only reason i use the Oculus quest is the Wander app that lets you browse street view in VR. I love to use the random feature to jump to random places. This planet is amazing

http://randomstreetview.com/#z70rz_-1ip9x_3f_a_0

Really surprised by how green everything was. About 100% of the spots I visited were surrounded by nature. I was expecting everything to be urban.

https://www.globegenie.com/ has been around for a super long time.

Turns out chromium gives gyro data by default?

Can you by chance add a country to the dropdown list India or do you have some limitations I presume anyways thanks a lot!!

I think India was enabled for streetview just a month back. May be its just about updating the site

I got some road in Skog, Schweden. Wherever that is. This is fun and less scary than chat roulette.

Ideas could be combined for ultimate creep. Open up web page and get matched with a cartoon avatar of some random other user, standing in the middle of the street talking to you. Extra points if you make the cartoon's mouth move while person is talking

-- quite amusing if you select Canada - of 10 clicks - 9 = trees - one = a flat empty horizon --

Wish it could filter to show cities or towns instead of middle of nowhere back roads.

It's insane how much of the world I can see sitting at my desk.

Is there some kind of bias, I kept being sent to Croatia

Love this. Thank tyou for sharing.

sigh - dropped me into a pleasant sunny pre-war Kviv

Reply on news.ycombinator.com