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Show HN: Random Street View

randomstreetview.com

356 pointshanezz166 comments

I don't mean to gatecrash, but as I have been running a near identical site for a few years I feel compelled to comment.

The street views generated on this site are not really random; they are picked from a predefined list in a db. This is why duplicates appear after a number of clicks.

I run http://www.mapcrunch.com which also generates random street views, but with more options - you can define a region on a map (like a city) and generate street views from within it. You can also restrict the generated views to those taken within buildings, or within urban areas. The views generated are also totally random.

I don't have any objection to someone copying the concept of an existing site / service, but I feel that if you do so, you should at least try to differentiate it in some way - most easily done by making improvements or including superior functionality.

I like this, but I am getting a lot of weird behavior. Sometimes clicking the image so I can pan it moves me to the previous image. Using the arrow keys sometimes pans the image, sometimes it takes me to the previous image.

Firefox 26.0, Windows 7

Heh, well that will teach me for boasting about my site. I just did a big UI update and am ironing out the bugs.

When you say 'previous image' do you mean the same image that you would see by clicking the back arrow next to the address?

Yes. playing with it a bit more, it seems when clicking in a location that does not give you the circle (to move your position) that this happens. If the circle is there it advances you along the road as it should. I am not sure, but I think it may be correlated with using the left/right arrow keys. i.e., use arrow keys to move forwards/backwards on the road, click "go" to go to the next image, and then click in the video with the mouse, and it displays the previous scene. But I can't make it 100% repeatable.

Also, I have it set on 'auto', and it seems to stop and not continue playing after several images. The play/stop button shows "stop(0)" and does not update. If I press the button twice to toggle playing it resumes (again for a short time).

Not complaining - I found the issues because I like it and am using it.

I'll try to reproduce the problems you mentioned. There are some keyboard shortcuts - J and K for previous and next image, and G for go. Maybe these are being triggered somehow.

When you see stop(0) it might still be searching for a Street View, especially if you're using the map.

Thanks again.

Any thoughts to have the defined searched represented in the URL, so that I can link to say, my city's randomized street view?

By default Random Street View puts the country in the url, which is sort of what I'm talking about.

Also you should maybe do a full screen thing (aka minimize the UI), like Random Street View.

http://randomstreetview.com/se#fullscreen

Thanks for the comments. I suppose I could represent the state in the URL, though it might be an ugly URL if many countries are selected.

I did already try to minimize the UI as much as possible - I'll see what else I can do.

I don't have any objection to someone copying the concept of an existing site / service

To be fair to the OP, nothing says it was copied from your site. They could have had the idea from GeoGuessr http://geoguessr.com/ the game where you have to guess where in the world you are based on StreetView, or they could have had it totally on their own too.

I don't know if it's fair to say he's copying - there's always the chance that they came up with it on their own. Are you really saying that you're the first person to come up with this idea?

Anyways, I think your site is much better... thanks for sharing. This is cool.

I didn't say he copied my site directly (clearly the design is totally different), and even if he did I don't mind at all.

My site wasn't the first, http://www.globegenie.com was. I liked the concept and built an improved version.

My only point was that if you are going to take an existing idea, build something better.

That presupposes that he realizes the idea was already executed.

In any case, even if he did, I can think of a number of very good reasons why building something similar to another already executed idea is still a worthwhile endeavor. For example, maybe he wanted a new portfolio piece or maybe he wanted to learn some new technologies.

I like both. Yours is nicer though.

This idea isn't terribly original. Matter of fact, I was just remarking that the idea is so unoriginal I'm surprised more people haven't implemented it. It's a good idea, just not incredibly unique. It's not too hard to believe that this person just came up with it on their own.

map crunch is awesome. I was totally obsessed with it for a while last year.

I created a random street view site while learning javascript. It was pretty basic like OPs except that it was actually random. Then I googled it and landed on your site. Decided it would be too much work to bring it to the same level and dropped the project.

I also don't think someone would intentionally copy the idea of your site. It was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw that Google's streetview has an api. There are other sites as well. This one [1] I particularly like.

[1] locatestreet.com

Nice! So interesting. This is the kind of thing that, 30 years ago, you could only dream about. Stuff like this reminds me how much we take things like the Internet and Google Street View for granted, and sometimes you need to step back and think how amazing they are.

But stepping forwards to a minor detail... are there keyboard shortcuts? If you click on the image, you can already use Google controls to pan/walk around using the arrow keys and +/-..., so that all works...

But it would be awesome if there were another shortcut to move to the next/previous location, so I could move around, and between images, solely using the keyboard.

Anyways, great work!

[Edit: another thing, so many locations seem to have... not much going on. Instead of picking a random spot by area, it might be interesting to pick a random spot by population distribution... so that half the locations would wind up being urban, and you'd see a lot more people.]

No, no! Don't do it by population distribution! The rural areas are what I want to see! Ahem . . . I mean, the random distribution ensures that everyone gets to see things they weren't looking for, and that's good.

I second this. Cities get boring pretty quickly.

OK, it seems that guys from cities want to see country sides more often and the guys from country side want to see cities and people. I guess the randomization engine should be biased to use the location of the user & serve him what he does not see very often.

Nope; I live in the country, and I'm curious about how rural people around the world live. The cities are neat too. Random is good.

Lots of those, too. My random view put me on the North Slope Haul Road in Alaska. Even more strange, there was a second Google car in the picture!

http://randomstreetview.com/#13i9ir_-2hkyi5_-5r_a_-2

> But stepping forwards to a minor detail... are there keyboard shortcuts? If you click on the image, you can already use Google controls to pan/walk around using the arrow keys and +/-..., so that all works... But it would be awesome if there were another shortcut to move to the next/previous location, so I could move around, and between images, solely using the keyboard.

Left and right arrow keys rotate the view, and if you rotate so an arrow in the Street View image is close to pointing up or down, then the up and down arrow keys work for moving forward and backward between locations.

edit: actually up and down arrow keys seem to always advance to the next locations, it just seems to pick whichever direction is pointing most up or most down, respectively.

I might be cool to let user select which "type" of random street he/she will stumble upon. For example "random landscapes", "random city", "random village", etc.

Sounds like something you could build with Mapillary, they have an API to get the images, the web view is all HTML5, key nav would be easy. See http://www.mapillary.com/map/im/WNYdrxB1Q8tiICsCFTra0A for an example

"so many locations seem to have... not much going on"

I think that's a problem today. We have a lot of things shouting at us. And when we are in the open we think nothing much is going on. But take a closer look ... ;)

I would love to know how much Google spends on StreetView.

When they first started sending those cars around, I think everyone collectively mocked, "Haha. Well you're certainly not going to photograph every street in the world."

Google's pretty good at thumbing their noses at the naysayers that say "Haha...you're not going to xxx all yyy".

xxx = crawl and cache, yyy = reachable pages on the web xxx = scan and preview, yyy = published books etc

What about "Haha, Well you're certainly not going to create a 3D point cloud of every street in the world"...

Google's self driving cars are just doing that.

EDIT: I can't find the post I once read, but this post also makes some clear: http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130502024505-99...

EDIT 2: Here a video of the presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXylqtEQ0tk @ 3:30 you can see the generated (and stored) point cloud.

That bit blew my mind.

I'd love to see some of those point clouds. Maybe Google has an artist-in-residence who could 3D print varies landmark locations?

That was actually a little bit sobering for me. I thought the AI techniques they use were much more general, autonomous and independent of map data. I didn’t know that location information of traffic signs, pavement etc. are taken from map data. But it makes sense to prefer data from most reliable sources.

When I first saw the article for the google patent on free ad-powered taxis[1], I immediately thought that it was another way to get get more cars for street view.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7114079

I think they buy a fair bit of their data from third party vendors, but I'm not positive. Still, aggregating and organizing all that information is impressive.

Some interesting non-street views in there:

http://randomstreetview.com/#fnso2_17h6mm_b0_a_-8

http://randomstreetview.com/#68vsh_19xpmm_100_a_-1

http://randomstreetview.com/#vbpgr_60bxi_b6_a_-1

http://randomstreetview.com/#953ql_19j07c_1ix_a_-g

Are these user submitted or has google actually been there?

According to Wikipedia [1]:

Areas not accessible by car, like pedestrian areas, narrow streets, alleys and ski resorts, are sometimes covered by Google Trikes (tricycles),[2] snowmobiles[3][4] or boats.[5] On each of these vehicles there are nine directional cameras for 360° views at a height of 2.5-3.0 meters (8.2-9.8 feet),[6][7] GPS units for positioning and three laser range scanners from Sick AG for the measuring of up to 50 meters 180° in the front of the vehicle.[8] These are used for recording a rough 3D model of the surroundings, enabling faux-3D transitions between distinct panoramas where the environment images are momentarily mapped onto this 3D model while being crossfaded to create an animated perspective change as the user travels from one panorama to another. There are also 3G/GSM/Wi-Fi antennas for scanning 3G/GSM and Wi-Fi hotspots.[9] More recently, high quality images have been based on open source hardware cameras from Elphel.[10]

It says "sometimes", though, so not sure how the other pics are captured.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Street_View

amazing.

Quite a few runs in the French ski resort of Les 2 Alpes are in Street View though I can't find any mention of this anywhere...

[With 2300m vertical it's a long way from the top of Les 2 Alpes to the bottom, also it is a classic "upside down" ski area].

It looks like Google had some fun on the slopes.

http://randomstreetview.com/#nbqp4_-1ro0vr_19_a_-9

I got one from inside a store, not sure how they fit the car in there:

http://randomstreetview.com/#c51wy_1aj9ay_48_a_-1

I believe they have Street View backpacks. Not sure of the specifics, but if I remember correctly you can walk around with the backpack and take pictures of places that cars can't get to and have them added to the map.

They have the Google Street View Trekker program[0] where they have the backpacks similar to the units mounted on their Street View cars. They tend to do "tourist attraction" type areas like monuments, parks, and so forth.

[0] http://www.google.com/maps/about/partners/streetview/trekker...

I wonder if this will be the next step for them; mapping all indoor and outdoor locations, integrating relevant ads into the street view of certain stores?

This may go some way to an explanation:

http://randomstreetview.com/#rrrxi_91xj4_-1g_0_-19

You can see their Street View stuff at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

Here is one on a train, I'm using the arrow keys to ride it through town.

http://randomstreetview.com/#rkof5_5zmfd_-av_a_-a

That is brilliant :)

Awesome

I ended up on the same train, not far from where you are.

http://randomstreetview.com/#rklpm_5zotk_-k_a_3

Maybe I got the cached results of a prior search?

Yup, same train for me. Came back to this thread just to post it, only to find you two already had.

I recall some "random street view" site a while back having the same behavior. Not sure if it was a different site, or same one is just making the news cycle again.

Get your nails done http://randomstreetview.com/us#oy6fz_-1g72mp_363_a_-a

It's "get your nails did" :)

I don't quite know why, but I want that carpet.

It really ties the room together.

http://9-eyes.com/

Cool site. Wonder why they don't link to the actual Google Maps Street View image. (Some of these make me question their authenticity.)

it is kind of an art project, so there's certainly the possibility (also wondering if that is part of the commentary).

That one in Rajasthan is good, but a pity they put that massive GSM antenna so close on the hill next to it!

http://geoguessr.com/

Random street view is like geo-guesser, just less fun.

Had a play.. nice site. I did feel slightly cheated than in 15 guesses 80% or so were in the US. A tiny bit less random and a bit more variety would be great :)

I felt like a disproportionate amount of mine were in Australia.

http://www.whereamidriving.com/ same concept as geoguessr but it's easier I guess because it's multiple choice.

There's definitely something intriguing about seeing random mundane scenes (with occasional awesome exceptions) in far away locations.

I found it weirdly compelling.

It's sort of like being omnipresent, how could it not be intriguing. One thing that's missing - live 3D footage viewable with your Oculus Rift... One can dream.

exactly my thoughts.

It reminds me of rally racing in a way.

One second I'm on a dusty, slippery looking dirt road in Peru. The next I'm about 15km NE of Monaco on a winding, single-ish lane mountain road.

There's a guy on Twitch who livestreams "playing" a game with something like this, except there's no map. It's a similar site that shows you a random location and he basically "walks" around and tries to drop a pin on a map as close to the point as possible. Sounds kinda boring but I ended up watching an hour of it and it's interesting the sort of visual clues and techniques you can use to suss places out.

Not sure if its the same one as the video you are referring to but here is a game that does exactly that.

http://geoguessr.com/

Awesome, I was just about to comment that making a game out of it would be cool!

Geoguessr is actually awesome for social gatherings and stuff, its amazing how you can sometimes get pretty close just from the first glance

I played a game like that once and happened to land right next to a sign that said it was the border between 2 states.

It’s quite banal, but it always baffles me that everywhere something is happening at the same time. A wast complexity which we can only make sense of because it all works according the same principles. People build roads, houses, raise families and eventually die. Isn’t there a word for this feeling?

If there is, its German, has 30 letters and contains "welt".

Do you mean "sonder"?

http://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/23536922667/s...

Yes! Thanks.

What's your randomizer? Maybe it's just me or maybe a lot of France looks the same but I swear I'm seeing a lot of repeats, perhaps as much as 1 in 20.

Random street view locations are retrieved from a database (on-the-fly lookup is too slow); France had not so much records; that has changed over the last 5 minutes though. Try again :)

Got the same issue with Peru, not that random. Regarding France, being french, I can assure you that there is a lot of records ;)

Btw you could use city location from wiki/dbpedia to generate random lat/long.

Peru just solved as well :)

If you are storing individual views in a DB, it will not be random, as there are far too many to store.

I'm getting lots of really pretty scenery in Bulgaria. So much that it's making me think about moving. I love this!

People interested in mapping and computers may also like this BBC Radio 4 programme "mapping the void" which covers some of the open sourced volunteer projects. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03s6mf0

Hmm, I found one of the infamous ghost towns and thought the opposite (I don't deny the beautiful places).

http://randomstreetview.com/#p0sb5_f2nu7_p7_a_-f

I might have found the most English looking location (also very beautiful)

http://randomstreetview.com/#vmyhk_-2h1og_4l_a_-g

Who'd have thought the most English looking location would be in Wales ;)

Good catch - my UK/Great Britain/England geography is not great.

http://f.kulfoto.com/pic/0001/0039/GY22q38509.jpg

It is very English looking though - doesn't even have araf written at the junction.

Its very beautiful, but that's in Wales.

Damn, how this makes me yearn to leave the suburbs

Neat! There was a similar project here a few years ago: http://www.mapcrunch.com/ comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3215460

Does it actually pick a completely random spot? Because the first one it showed me was a place I visited recently halfway around the world.

I've been enjoying a similar site, http://www.mapcrunch.com/, for 2 or 3 years. It is very well done. You can select one or many countries in the options menu. It's a great way of enjoying the world from your couch.

Denmark has separate paved bike streets out in the middle of the countryside! I sure wish the road systems in the United States were more bike friendly.

http://randomstreetview.com/#xqgi5_5um0z_64_d_-7

I ended up shrinking the map/location bar and then clicked on the "next" button and tried seeing how long it would take me to figure out where I was. There are a lot of immediate clues, like what side of the street people are driving on, the ethnicity of people if they're at the side of the road, the condition and type of the cars/buildings and a lot of geographical features like mountains and red soil.

It reminded me of a thought exercise I used to do about what would I do if I were kidnapped and then drugged/blindfolded/disorientated/whatever and then dropped somewhere in the world. I'd come up with elaborate strategies to try and find my way back home.

Even though I mostly end up in the middle of nowhere this surely makes me want to travel :)

Check out this sweet dragon.

http://randomstreetview.com/#wrua5_dhcmy_2m_a_-3

Seriously, this is a fantastic thing you've made. I'm enjoying it immediately.

Amazing. This is literally the end of a small road in the middle of nowhere (no offense), Lithuania. How few people ever see this person's home, and how few outsiders does this person come across in their back yard? And all of a sudden, here we are, all looking at this person's yard with more intrigue than they'd ever guess.

There's an interesting game one can play with such sites - get a random location, and try to find your way back to an airport without looking at a map

...Of course, this was easier before google indexed so much countryside....

Wonderful ! The sites like yours remind me why I love Streetview, which is like a gift for me. I take this opportunity to share one of my favorites blogs, "Dreamlands - Virtual Tour". It's a photograph blog, like every photograph blogs, except that all pictures are made with Streetview ! You don't have to speak french to enjoy it. Some places are incredible. http://dreamlands-virtual-tour.blogspot.fr/

Ok now I'll spend my entire day on this! However, my friend also visited the website and guess what? The same sequence of streets was showed to him. How this random works?

Yes!!! I sometimes do this manually by zooming out the map and then dropping the Street View pin with my eyes only half open (can't drop him in the ocean).

A non-random Street View project that has some very interesting images.

http://9-eyes.com/

If you want a true long tail street picture app, there is a new one - Mapillary - with only phones and HTML5 no cars etc involved, e.g. http://www.mapillary.com/map/im/jvEX_s9fM7SwTDoMdeYDOw - works everywhere where you can have a smartphone and GPS fix.

This is fantastic. I've seen similar sites, but this kind of thing never gets old no matter how many sites there are. I'm from Australia and I find it highly comical that every street I was given was basically a dirt road in the bush, haha. I wasted a good while on this, not the kind of thing I should be doing when I've got work to do!

It's funny seeing the attention these vehicles draw coming out in some of the photos. This is especially true on dirt streets in the middle of residential areas.

Walk this one back down the street, you can see the pedestrians watching.

http://randomstreetview.com/#-6p0t9_-nfxtl_qa_a_-2

been around longer and funner: http://www.geoguessr.com/

Interesting! A few things:

- Some locations repeat after a short while - Not sure how the randomization is done, but some countries like Botswana and Bulgaria seem over-represented - Address language seems random (often English, sometimes other, not much relation to where location is -- e.g. some US locations had addresses shown in Czech etc.)

A small bias towards more variety was introduced to prevent 80% of locations being in the US. Repeating locations are possible but should be increasingly rare.

I'll further tweak the randomization patterns for the better. And fix the address language indeed.

Thanks for the feedback!

Hey, did you get the idea after seeing http://smwh.re ?

I built something similar for university. Though it uses location from Instagram, the photo, and description text to provide some context. http://sm.rutgers.edu/thebeat/

I recall something similar that would show random places on street view and you had to guess where it was located on the map. The closer you were the more points you would get. Does anybody remember how that was callled, because that was way cool.

That's http://geoguessr.com/ !

http://geoguessr.com/

I chose United Kingdom and on the second click it showed a street in my childhood hometown!

This is really neat! The very first place it took me was overlooking a sweet crater in Yosemite. Then there were a couple boring ones then a super awesome church in the Czech republic. ... And now I'll forget about this forever.

You can use this to answer questions like below:

1. How much of the roads in the world passes through dessert?

2. What is the chance that you would see a person if you had been driving all over?

3. How much of the streets are in urban areas?

And so on...

All you need to do is just press next few times and count!

That assumes that Google hasn't prioritized areas with higher population for Street View photography.

That's a great idea. It'd make for a great education app, perhaps walking the user through the solution for their own town.

This was on mobile as a game a while ago https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/map-mayhem/id608008620?mt=8

I didn't even know that Google had street view cars in rural Africa! http://randomstreetview.com/#-en562_fdoqw_-2i_a_-7

Wow, it only took me two clicks to get a glitched out shot : http://randomstreetview.com/#p6d4o_-4vsu8_93_a_4

Well, is really does what it says, that _was_ random: http://randomstreetview.com/#phyzb_dnid7_-d_r_-5

Great! I am getting lots of beautiful scenery. An up vote/down vote or ratings system would be great, and then you could start compiling a list of the most beautiful (or interesting) views.

I was surprised to see that most street-views in the world are rural.

Yes. Check Ukraine.

This site does the same thing and has been around atleast a few years: http://www.globegenie.com/

At first I thought, what is the point?

Then I clicked next a few times and visited random parts of France, Lithuania, Norway, and Harju County, Estonia on the coast of the Baltic Sea.

This is really cool.

My colleague just showed me http://geoguessr.com/, which is a pretty fun twist on the same concept.

I used to love to just take a 'walk' using street view from time to time. This is great. It really gives you a sense of how enormous the data set is.

Reminds me of the fantastic game based around random street view: http://geoguessr.com/

This was pretty cool

http://randomstreetview.com/#m19t2_-1xxgr6_-o_a_-7

This would make an awesome wallpaper/screen saver.

http://randomstreetview.com/#slideshow

awesome, it would be sweet if the slideshow does a fade in/fade out.

Hey Y'all on OS X. Just compile this little tool https://github.com/liquidx/webviewscreensaver

Then add the url http://randomstreetview.com/#slideshow to the url playlist of the screen saver.

Or get the binary here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/c03r77x5vm1wirp/WebViewScreenSaver...

One neat feature/bug is that if you have multiple monitors the screens seem like they are pointed to different angles of the same exact place. I suspect the randomness algo is based on JS timestamps.

Cool.

Within a few minutes of clicking NEXT I started getting duplicates.

Or not so random. I keep getting USA, Taiwan, Estonia and Sweden far more often than any other countries. Do they have the most streets? :P

Wow, the second random street is in my hometown.

You've gotta get a tinfoil hat, or a lottery ticket. Perhaps both.

I'm curious: has Google used any of its autonomous vehicles to perform mapping for Street View?

Would be cool if it gave you a slow 360 view instead of just a random side of the road. Good job!

reminds me of a manager i worked for in 2000. he wrote a random lat/lang algo and actually used it for his vacation trips.

http://www.abulsme.com/trip/spottool.html

this is a clear upgrade :)

Can we go by city? PLEASE. I think you could charge something for this. Maybe a one-time fee.

I would love to see a like feature here to aggregate the most amazing pics around the world.

You should weight the streets by population, as that is what people "experience".

It's really awesome to see how much of the world looks almost exactly like my street.

I guess I hit the API limit very quickly after 20-30 tries. Map does not refresh anymore.

Simple. Enjoyable. I just found several dozen places I want to travel to.

Strangely hypnotizing! Fun!

Love it. Could be the source for some interesting social activities.

Great, i landed in the middle of nowhere in Oklahoma.

Story of my life...

Amazing :) An auto turner and a timmer would be nice.

This would be pretty awesome as a screensaver.

Try http://randomstreetview.com/#slideshow , and switch your browser to fullscreen modus.

That's great and all, but a real screensaver provides a cheap way to lock a computer, and is functional and can be beautiful as well. This is beautiful, would love a screensaver of this to lock my computer when I step away from it.

Really enjoying this! Thanks for building!

kudos for the mobile support that's what i'm going to do on my ride home today

This is really awesome, thanks!

Not random.

I don't see North Korea?

good idea!

How does it work without flash?? I was never able to use street view because in google maps when you zoom in it just says in a popup:

  To use street view, you need Adobe Flash Player version 10 or newer.
  Get the latest Flash Player.

It's a canvas element that they render to now. It's very similar to the previous Flash implementation, in that it's an area of the screen they can draw on. It just happens to be in Javascript instead of Actionscript now.

But if i go to maps.google.com and zoom in, it apparently is using flash and doesn't work. The linked site does work. I'm guessing there's some API you can use for google maps, and it uses the non-flash version. But is there a way to use the non flash version on maps.google.com?

I think that the map without flash is still gradually rolling out, but you can apply to have it.

I don't know if others suggested this but it might be interesting to define a rectangular region and it would only return views from inside that rectangle. Let's see how well I actually know my hometown.

You can do this on www.mapcrunch.com

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