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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

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.]

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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.

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 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.

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