Man ran 700 miles to make 'insanely impressive' art on GPS fitness app | Hacker News Reader

Man ran 700 miles to make 'insanely impressive' art on GPS fitness app

washingtonpost.com

225 pointsbookofjoe68 comments

World’s largest (7 countries, 7,237km) Strava art is finally finished (2 points, 2 years ago, no comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32523588

Strava artist draws pictures with his bike and GPS (2 points, 9 years ago, no comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11138751

US teacher tracks his bike rides by GPS - and creates some stunning artwork (14 points, 13 years ago, 4 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3518331

Swedish artist ships GPS to make world's biggest sketch (4 points, 17 years ago, 3 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=201026

https://archive.ph/ocmAK

Direct link to the TikTok video: https://www.tiktok.com/@duncan77mccabe/video/743836674477690...

Also on youtube: https://youtu.be/fO--TM4_6hw

appreciate it, also wow his min/km is very good

Art can't wait

running 1hr/day will do that to you

but how about an entire city? http://pac.tom7.org/

I highly recommend tom7's YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/suckerpinch

His videos are ambitious, nerdy/technical, and really funny.

He also appears immensely intelligent, motivated and kind, which makes for great content. I'm glad I discovered his channel here in the past.

I'm actually a bit jealous of his intelligence, motivation, creativity, and personality. Maybe letting go of that jealousy could be a good first step toward becoming a bit more like him, even if just a little :)

Seriously though, for me, it's like Christmas when he releases a new video.

It’s one of the few channels that I’m glad doesn’t release more than one or two videos per year. When a new one comes out, you know it’s going to be extremely high quality. It’s clear he puts a lot of effort into them; every video is such a treat.

If you want to do it for yourself, https://wandrer.earth/ (not affiliated)

Nice project, I really like it. I have tried to upload my runs, but it didnt recognize lot of streets, I have runned through.

If I focus on missing section it seems that my recorded GPS track is few meters in the building and even no street is near wanderer just does not count it and it is missing ability to edit in map. I cant even edit the GPS in 3rd party app and upload as it is missing the upload ability and wants to be synced only via Strava. I am using Strava just as the middleware to upload GPX files to wanderer as I didnt find other way...

Can someone who is familiar with Toronto say if this feels realistic to them? I understand the bits where the lines stick to the street grid, but some of the lines appear to be crossing blocks in a very clean and straight way.

Not saying it is not real but it is just a bit too clean to me. Even with extremely good planning i would expect that the lines would need to compromise sometimes to avoid buildings.

For the diagonal lines the runner turned his GPS off at some points, and turned back on at another, causing Strava to fill in the missing data with a diagonal line

> For the diagonal lines the runner turned his GPS off at some points, and turned back on at another, causing Strava to fill in the missing data with a diagonal line

This part of Toronto also has laneways, so if you use the above feature, in combination with crossing through laneways that don't show up as streets at this level of zoom, you can perhaps get diagonal interpretation from Strava.

from his twitter/x acct, https://x.com/mccabedj/status/1860191515349504467 and https://x.com/mccabedj/status/1860192166561349753

    People were generally understanding when I walked through homes. But when it got inconvenient I just stoped/started the app to get Strava to draw B-line between the points

    Strava requires a run to be continuous. So I do the full run. And in post I trim off the extra bits to get the hat in the air

Doable for sure, however an incredibly boring running route.

> Doable for sure, however an incredibly boring running route.

The green patch in the head when the video starts is Christie Pits:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christie_Pits

The green patch by the right leg is:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_Bellwoods_Park

Both are nice, but the run would is done via Ossington on the left of the body:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossington_Avenue

And Gorve Vale/Grace on the right of the body. Ossington would probably have decent street life.

Ossington has basically no street life from Bloor to Dundas. Once you get south of Dundas it gets very lively, but the northern stretch of Ossington is a bit bleak, as someone who has also run a lot in that neighbourhood.

Why do you say this? I used to live right in the center of the stick figure, and regularly did the loop up around Christie Pits or down around Trinity Bellwoods. Those streets are great for running, not boring at all.

I must confess, I looked at the map, looked at the streets, and even though I know exactly where that is as I live at Ossington and Dundas, my brain took spadina crescent on that map and somehow anchored it as the area next to the U of T circle to the east, so in my mind the map was all around the AGO... I dunno why.

I live in Toronto and know who Duncan is. I can vouch he did this for real.

Toggling Strava pauses to get nice straight lines is definitely a bit of a trick to make it nicer.

This is literally in the article.

> When there are buildings in the way of a line he needs to draw, “I pause the app, then when I get to the desired destination, I resume,” he said. “When you un-pause, Strava runs a direct line between the two points.”

may be just missing position samples from corners, end result is a shortcut line

A friend of mine did something similar-but-smaller a few years back. Told me he had the idea and mapped it out, but didn't estimate it well. Rough estimate was maybe 10 or so miles, but it turned out to be over 20, but halfway through he didn't want to give up.

https://wdet.org/2020/05/15/this-detroiter-ran-21-miles-to-s...

Don't break the chain! [0]

[0] https://lifehacker.com/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-secret-2...

Airplanes are in on this action too. [0][1]

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/10r3k9p/...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34616511

My favorite one of these was the last 747 delivery flight

My dad got bored in the peak of the pandemic and wrote a name over Kentucky. https://imgur.com/a/ZBu2EYT

It's quite a common trick in airplanes. Someone drew a "50" over half of the Netherlands for the 50th anniversary of the flight school I teach at.

In airplanes it's not that hard. You can draw the route on your iPad on the ground, then load those GPS points into the plane via Bluetooth and fly it. A modern autopilot could even fly it for you, but you'd have to sit there being bored for a few hours.

If you do it at low altitude in uncontrolled airspace you're free to draw whatever you want. In controlled airspace you may get ATC interfering with your drawing. But even that can be coordinated, mapping companies do that all the time, fly very specific patterns in coordination with ATC.

I used to, back in the better days whence I ran, keep gps records of most of my trajectories.

None ever made significant art, but it's not an unpleasant exercise in itself to mentally revisit the paths while attempting to remember as many details as possible.

There's so much think-time on distance runs, so much to take in, if the discomfort doesn't lower the proverbial brow beneath the shoe into the gutters of the mind, which it often did for me.

Sometimes I enjoy doing this, too. Makes one wonder about memory..

That’s many things, but is it insanely impressive art? I don’t think so.

The whole thing is art. Doesnt have to impress anyone.

The title claims it is "insanely impressive." While the art doesn't need to be "insanely impressive," if the title uses that phrase, we would expect it to be impressive.

I, my self, haven't looked at the article yet, but I would imagine the criticism is on a "click baitish title" - not on the art

Update: I have watched the video. That is damn impressive

I only looked at the stills before, but I agree that the animation really is an impressive achievment. However, there is nothing below the surface here. The stick figure takes a few steps and lifts its hat. The medium is impressive, the art not so much.

Well, it's more impressive than this "artwork" that sold for $6M:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedian_(artwork)

You are not wrong.

“The real value is the concept.”

Insipidly Hegelian.

From the scare quotes I thought it would be a giant penis. Alas it's not.

Don’t worry, from just six weeks ago:

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/welshman-says-...

It should be in the national gallery.

It’s the IMAX version of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Boy_and_His_Atom!

Finally, a solid theory for what those giant petroglyphs were for!

My brother used the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources mining claim infrastructure to draw mile high letters.

http://puddle.ca/~lba/MINE/maps.html

We spent two weeks in the bush blazing trees and cutting corner posts to make it happen.

The word "MINE" was printed on official ministry maps for two years until the claims expired.

All those GPS art pieces reminded me of Nazca lines in Peru, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazca_lines. Are the GPS art pieces a modern version of Nazca lines?

Presumably the peoples who made that art couldn’t see it from above. Unless it was aliens

"And I would walk 700 miles, then I would walk 700 more..." :-) The Proclaimers

Now Niantic just needs to integrate this idea into huge pentagrams or other complex shapes that you have to physically trace by walking vast distances in order to capture certain rare pokemon.

Pretty sure they sort of did this with their prior game, the name of which escapes me at the moment.

You'd basically draw giant triangles by visiting the vertices (or coordinating with remote team members) to control territory.

It'd be neat to see it explored more.

Ingress is what you are thinking of.

The only thing he's missing is that he did this "for charity".

Next he goes to fight poor children in Africa.

He'll probably win, poor children are actually not such good fighters.

This is what you call “iron will”

Thought this was gonna be tom7.

You don't have to run a single mile to produce such routes. You can easily fake the runs.

It is possible to draw on a map in other ways, yes.

Why not drive (at least part of the way if one-ways are an issue)?

He was probably actually exercising and injected some extra fun. Cycling could have been an acceptable faster method. Driving is right there with using Paint to do the whole thing, only less convenient.

This, if your workout plan for the day has you running is six miles a day, rather than just running the same path over and over again, might as well have fun with it and add a bit more fun to your workout.

There was Pac-Man played by GPS a long time ago.

If only he knew how to zoom. He could've made this in less than 7 miles in a day. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I do not understand all those links behind paywall here. what's the point

I need to meet this individual — amazing!

This is a prime example of why we are universe goofing around for eternity under disguise of fake seperation using make believe personalities and genes.

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