11 ms·
MIT Globe Genie (Random Street View)
- dangoldin 16y agoMakes you realize how rural the world actually is. You lose sight of that living in a big city.
- ugh 16y agoYou might think that trees rule this world.
- Groxx 16y agoAgreed. They're already using squirrels for reproduction / child rearing / getting them young 'uns out of the house. And once you control the squirrels, you're not far from controlling everything....
- threepointone 16y agoreminds me of one of my favorite short stories - The Distinguished Stranger (Robert Louis Stevenson) http://www.authorama.com/fables-12.html http://www.authorama.com/fables-12.html
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- Estragon 16y agoIt might choose more interesting places if it sampled from the human population distribution.
- waterlesscloud 16y agoI find the rural places more interesting. I live in a megacity, it's nice to see some countryside.
- swombat 16y agoI don't know... I clicked a few times... the first time was a beautiful, picturesque spot in the Lake District in England. Every stop after that was some kind of inter-state or major road in the US, with basically nothing around but trees and a road. It got boring pretty quickly. This would have been much more interesting if they'd allowed people to vote places that they were parachuted in up or down, and then displayed the distribution of interesting places around the world. Also would have been nice if the "search" wasn't so slow.
- djacobs 16y agoIt's weird... the first five scenes I saw were fantastic, exotic, sharp images, and I was so inspired I sent the link to several of my family and friends. Now, I'm clicking through, and I can't find any more good ones. Weird?
- greendestiny 16y agoJust untick everything except Europe.
- GFischer 16y agoIndeed... first it showed me some rural area in Scotland, then some beautiful suburban place in Denmark, then somewhere equally beautiful in Holland - I'm amazed at those countries. I'd love to live in such a place.
- Charuru 16y agoLooks like overpopulation is far from being a problem...
- jacobolus 16y agoHow rural it is, by area (or by street distance) sure, but by population the world is now > 50% urban. (And the “more developed regions” are 75% urban by population.)
- Estragon 16y agoA web page which gives a google street view of a random location somewhere in the world. Not sure why this is interesting.
- chaosmachine 16y agoIt's interesting because the world is so large. It's interesting because you never know what you're going to see. It's interesting because most people wouldn't even dream this was possible just a few years ago.
- mkr-hn 16y agoIt's like StumbleUpon for the planet.
- Groxx 16y agoLooks like they're randomly dropping the viewer until they get a hit (I've gone over "searching (600)"). I wonder if there's a faster way to do that with their API?
- bd 16y agoCompletely random drop would fare really bad (street view is very rare compared to Earth's surface). What I would do is a sort of "computer vision". Map has well defined colors for features, so you just need to check pixels with proper shading. This should be quite easy as street view availability seems like a transparent overlay image, so you even wouldn't need to distinguish it from other map features. And even if it's composited with the map image server-side, it should be still quite easy to extract it, just look for pixel diff compared to normal map image.
- Groxx 16y agoI'd assume it only attempts drops on streets. In which case, as badly as one in a few hundred drops on only streets? I bet it'd be pretty close. They've street-viewed an absolutely ridiculous amount of roads.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- aroon 16y agoIn the time it took to act smart you could have just read the code and seen that his intuition was mostly right. The code is extremely simple. It reads like a half day project just for fun that happened to get picked up on HN. It doesn't seem to be at all related to his line of study either. For you interest and information, he has a defined set of bounding boxes in the world for each of the user pickable regions. He generates random lat lons until one lands in an enabled region's bounding box and then makes a request for street view data to google. If google returns a 200 he sets the street view display to the lat Lon and otherwise tries to find another lat Lon. If he ever gets a 500 from Google he quits.
- vyrotek 16y agoAh... I have to admit, it made me smile. It randomly brought me to Italy and to an area I knew pretty well (Torino/Milano). I have family over there :)
- Towle_ 16y agoRandomly? Sure, some MIT guy made it...but this is Google we're talking about. ;)
- chriskelley 16y agoThis really puts the amount of data Google had acquired for Streetview into perspective. It took me from the Rhondda Valley in Wales, to Fresno, CA, to Virrat, Finland. The breadth is amazing.
- raghus 16y agoI lack the skills to write it but it would be great if I could enter the addresses of two US locations and a website took me for a virtual drive along the route by using Google Maps + Street View
- astrofinch 16y agoMaybe someday we'll never need to get up from our computers
- raghus 16y agoDunno about that but I am just hoping to either re-live a memory or, waste some random time virtually driving between cities I may not be able to visit anytime soon.
- harshpotatoes 16y agoI didn't realize how much of the world Google had mapped... It seems like just last year that Seattle wasn't even included yet...
- nostrademons 16y agoOn the contrary, I'm amazed at just how much of Africa is South Africa. Out of maybe a dozen tries, I have had one African hit that was not in South Africa, and that was a Spanish-owned island off the coast of the Sahara.
- bd 16y agoSampling bias. Try normal Google Maps, zoom out to see the whole world. Drag yellow StreetView dude, you will see blue overlay showing StreetView coverage (ignore isolated dots, these are Panoramio photos). You will see that South Africa is the only place in Africa with coverage.
- nostrademons 16y agoRight, that was my point. I was trying to be ironic with my claim that all of Africa is South Africa.
- harshpotatoes 16y agoOk, so maybe not the world. But I'm still impressed by the amount of north america/europe that is mapped.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- chris24 16y agoThis is awesome. Anyone know how to link someone to a specific location that I found with this?
- bconway 16y agoFun tool. It's what I imagine living Quantum Leap to be like. ;)
- sebastianavina 16y agonow I want to travel around the globe :(
- pierre_M 16y agoIs there any way I can get rid of the caption that tells me where I am? I think it would be more fun as a guessing game. Look at the local vegetation, architecture, and kinds of cars you see around, and see if you can figure out where in the world you are. (The street name is also a pretty big hint.) I tried playing it a couple of times just by covering up the appropriate part of the screen. It's often surprisingly easy to narrow it down, but sometimes ridiculously hard.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- hermanthegerman 16y agoI love it, but why does it take so much time for 'searching' ? Is it generating random coordinates and then tries to match them with street view coverage ?
- hermanthegerman 16y agoBesides the caching question, having permalinks to share that random view would be awesome.