Google Maps: “Treasure Map” mode | Hacker News Reader

Google Maps: “Treasure Map” mode

maps.google.com

167 pointsmathias80 comments

This is beautiful, though, I'm oddly disappointed that when showing a route to a destination, it doesn't mark the destination with "x marks the spot".

http://goo.gl/maps/67c3y

It's a hack. The line and X are in screen space and change position when you zoom in and out.

What's rather special about this is StreetView.

ooh yes. faux-sepia, vignetting, scratches. beautifully done!

I'm not too impressed with the "treasure map" style maps of my local neighbourhood though, apart from the names in a different font, an arbitrary icon here and there, there's hardly any details at all, not even the larger roads are complete.

None of the ogres or trolls are mapped in my neighborhood either, nor are there any ships falling off the map in to a pit of monsters, lame. Although I do give them points for the flatness of the map.

When you zoom in, the dust spots rotate. Awesome.

Made me touch my monitor, silly me

Some landmarks have coordinates on them. I followed the chain for a while, but then I lost it.

https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=42.359305,-71.067467&t=8...

Manhattan https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.713175,-73.998499&spn...

Beijing and London also have some landmarks iconized

I kept following the coordinates, but now I can't get past 13.227246, -61.169043

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=47.57,-122.25&hl=en&l... is next (correction)

I think 37.89,-61.96 is actually next, although it does take you to your location after that. The trick is to see the comma after the nine, indicating to enter the numbers in the other order.

Lost my chain at http://goo.gl/maps/Oy5kw

mine ended in a similar manner - https://maps.google.com/maps?q=50.62,+-113.81&hl=en&...

that just so happens to be very near to where I'm currently located. wonder if thats the plan?

I followed this to a geometer's compass at 29.14,129.19, but there doesn't seem to be any other coordinates. (One before that was at 24.3775,124.1555.)

I wonder if you would find anything if you actually went to those coordinates in person

I found that, a red sword, and a red coin which didn't have coordinates. Tried following the lines they made but didn't have any luck.

It's also weird that there are large numbers sometimes and red numbers sometimes, they definitely mean something. From the video they posted this won't be an easy puzzle to solve.

I followed a trail starting at a skull in Amsterdam, and ended up at a red revolver.

Edit: Coordinates of revolver: -5.06,-64.36

Here's Gangnam style: https://maps.google.com/maps?q=hong+kong&ll=37.504415,12...

This is such a little thing that is going to be absolutely great for my nieces and nephews.

When getting directions, the markers and line between the start and end points are the same. They should add in a dashed line and a big black X for the destination as soon as possible :-)

A weekend trip to a national park can be made that much more fun by having a family treasure hunt with the kids in the back seat "navigating" the way.

It's just an April Fools thing, so it will probably only be accessible for the next day or so.

Very cute little icons for landmarks in the cities. They put a bird on Portland.

The bird on it brings me so much joy.

I also love the effects on Street View.

I don't understand why New York has a pirate skull with numbers in the eye sockets: http://i.imgur.com/xNnJvU7.png

There's a similar one in Amsterdam.

Seems to be the only "special" icon in NL though.

Go to the coordinates in the eye sockets, and it takes you to another landmark with coordinates.

Didn't seem to work for me.

The coordinates that are indicated in the landmarks are a bit hard to read sometimes, and you have to piece them together. The skull in New York is pointing to: (-15.36, 15.90). After searching for that location, zoom in on the green arrow, and you should see a piece of ham that is pointing to: (-21.53, 46.05)

The coordinates at the sword that comes next are also ambiguous. You have to infer that the 9 in the handle is indicating that the first number is 9.81.

Oh, I see - thank you!

Supposedly there are Treasure Chests somewhere. Not sure if you have to be in Street View to find them or not. Might be an early April fools though...

any thoughts how you would implement this? To apply the sepia filter to the street view images would double the storage used for all the images, which is huge! Alternatively to apply the sepia filter each time a image is loaded would add a lot of load to the servers, especially if the joke is spread around the world? So some kind of caching would be in place? Or is it done in browser with the flash plugin which would be the most boring option, but also the most plausible... (that would also explain why the webgl version does not work)

The world map is just images at different zoom levels with an algorithm that adds trees, that would not be a problem I guess?

Seems like it is implemented using Flash (right click on the street view image and you'll see the Flash context menu)

If you load a streetview you might see a split second of color, before the (flash) sepia filter gets added.

If you turn on 3D mode (right mouse -> 3D mode on) the ring and dust/scratches remain, but the sepia filter is removed.

If the maptype parameter is 8 (&t=8) assets get loaded from the "papermaps" directory:

  https://maps.gstatic.com/intl/en_ALL/mapfiles/papermaps/

Instead of:

  https://maps.gstatic.com/intl/en_ALL/mapfiles/

This way I found an image of the map controls that isn't implemented:

  https://maps.gstatic.com/intl/en_ALL/mapfiles/papermaps/mapcontrols3d2.png

Notice the squiggly lines and the streetview icon.

The world map seems to be indeed just images. Compare:

  http://maps.gstatic.com/mapfiles/mv/hpimgs6.png
  http://maps.gstatic.com/mapfiles/papermaps/hpimgs.png

I love this company for such projects!

Am I missing something? This looks identical to regular google maps: http://i.imgur.com/8gi8dfV.jpg

It should look like this:

http://i.imgur.com/HvSAZod.jpg

you need to turn off webgl experimental

Guys, we have started a map with all the red end points. It's here http://bit.ly/123SO9w . Feel free to had your end points . so far we have two medals, a ring, two guns/revolver, a rope, a snake, a compass. It seems that some object have the shape of their initial letter (snake = S, rope = R)

Just added the gun in Brazil !

Thanks a lot, we now have 8

All the letters together spell out "APRIL FOOLS"

This might be a stupid question, but I don't see how to view or edit any marked end points on the map you linked to.

Spoilers: There's a bunch of people collecting clues/locations together in this shared spreadsheet - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ajc_VqH8uv38dFd...

So I found 2 red letters (C at -28.30,-57.30; M at 34.61,135.73), as well as three red signs (- sign at 35.11,-75.98, 9 at 76.50,-24.01, and 1 at 68.92,40.64) so there’s probably a super secret location given by the red coordinates but I don’t know what the letters mean.

Spoilers:

Check out this communally gathered data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ajc_VqH8uv38dFd...

Apparently, all of the big red letters at the end of the trails spell out "APRIL FOOLS". The smaller red letters and numbers spell "MMC-900913", which is a reference to last year's 8-bit map.

In this video, you can see MMC-900913 printed on the a controller chip at 29s. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rznYifPHxDg&feature=youtu...

Found it: http://goo.gl/maps/67c3y

The "pirate supply store" at 826 Valencia is a landmark.

http://goo.gl/maps/1XBK4

http://826valencia.org/store/

When unzooming completely (using Opera), France and Great Britain are conjoined twins. And so on for Morocco and Spain, Denmark and Norway, Sicily and the rest of Italy...

Now think about what History would have been...

Here's the blog post about it:

http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2013/03/find-treasure-wit...

just incase it doesn't work for someone else, you need to be using the "classic" maps mode - if you are using opengl mode it will not work...

Beautiful. Is this an April Fools' joke or a permanent Easter Egg? (In the latter case, I suppose it'd be fitting that today is Easter.)

It's an April Fools' joke.

I followed the clues to here 50.62,-113.81 - just north of this spot, "X" marks the spot if you look using satellite view

They shut down Google Reader then put up a pointless map hack. Recognize that putting this together took a bunch of people's time and energy, not to mention processing power, server load, etc. All reasons for shutting down Reader.

What is the message Google is communicating to everyone? "We're still fun, just less useful?" Sorry if I don't have room to appreciate their "corporate whimsy" anymore.

You could have been out helping people instead of writing this comment.

Not saying either is right or wrong, but there's a difference between a major product and what was likely a side project of a few employees.

Project decisions aren't binary. I'd assume that people that worked on Reader didn't work on this.

Reader was based on a very old Google platform that was no longer viable. Porting Reader to the new infrastructure essencially meant rebuilding the entire thing as a new project. The amount of work does not even compare to an April Fools hack by the Maps team.

Can we please stop using everything that Google does as an excuse to complain about Reader?

Where are you getting that information?

I guess they made us all last-day-of-March fools.

As in fools that forget that their couch is not the center of the earth? Wake up, it's April 1st in some parts of the world now. As an exercise in self-education, go find out which.

First, it's my bed. Second, I didn't know the world was round, I've always thought it was flat.

Google's official blog post: "Find treasure with Google Maps Sunday, March 31, 2013 at 10:37 AM"

The YouTube video accompanying that post, published on March 31, 2013.

And Hacker News is a US-based and US-focused website. So excuse me for letting my US bias creep into my throwaway comment.

But I apologize to all those in Iran who are celebrating April Fools Day right now.

Yes, published USA time, but most of the world's population is living in April 1st now (India, China, Japan - all Asia essentially, Australia and so on). So it's not only Iran.

This riff is getting really old. People used Google Reader. Google took it away for its own reasons. It was Google's to take away. If anything, this creates a slight inconvenience to its users but a huge opportunity for someone else to come along and innovate.

Especially in a company the size of Google, there is no mutual exclusivity between working on Product X and implementing minuscule feature Y.

I'm annoyed about Google Reader too but give it a rest already. This is a whole different scale of project.

Why downvote this comment instead of engage? I thought Hacker News was supposed to be about discussion not Reddit upvote battles.

> What is the message Google is communicating to everyone?

"April Fools'"

20% time?

The comparison is moot (different scales/time and effort). Also, don't trivialize the importance of having fun and being able to do so in a fairly large company.

Wasn't this from last year? I'm pretty sure I remember a similar programmatic map transformation at least...

Last year was the 8-bit Quest world

google images search: http://www.bit.ly/10qcvSy

Last year's was 8-bit

nice easter egg : following the "treasure hunt" leads to red letters spelling out "APRIL FOOLS".

Along each of the trails leading to the red letters, there are also hidden letters that spell out "MMC-900913" (a reference to last years google maps april fools)

FYI: this does not work if you have MapGL enabled. You just see the normal map.

This is neat and a great example of encouraging "p2p" marketing.

(Stomp Aberdeen.) Loch Ness. Monster on the map.

look at this spot, or very, very close to it in satellite view - X Marks the spot.

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