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Show HN: I Was Here – Draw on street view, others can find your drawings
Hey HN, I made a site where you can draw on street-level panoramas. Your drawings persist and other people can see them in real time.
Strokes get projected onto the 3D panorama so they wrap around buildings and follow the geometry, not just a flat overlay. Uses WebGL2 for rendering, Mapillary for the street imagery.
The idea is for it to become a global canvas, anyone can leave a mark anywhere and others stumble onto it.
- sans_souse 7mo agoI love it until fine I'll signup and love it again but then no you pay now. My 2 cents is all I have to give.
- mrktsm__ 7mo agoI hear you on the friction. I’m experimenting with the 'ink' limits right now, also the ink actually regenerates. I think I need to make it more obvious in the UI
- sans_souse 7mo agoI was definitely finding it fun, responsive etc. Started to do a Simpsons-esque tag in Boston but ran out of credit. Hope to see more leeway keep up the good work
- mrktsm__ 7mo agoThanks! Just increased the free ink limit. Your strokes should regenerate, come finish that Simpsons tag!
- yukapero 7mo agogood work! this is like Wplace but in 3D
- mrktsm__ 7mo agoThanks! That was the main inspiration.
- FailMore 7mo agoGood fun thanks! Found a cute cat in Buenos Aires. It seems you have quite a lot of activity already, is that all from HN in the last two hours or from something else before this?
- mrktsm__ 7mo agoMostly from HN in the last 2 hours, yeah. Had some early users before but nothing like this spike. Glad you found the cat drawing!
- colejhudson 7mo agoHow are the panoramas chosen? That is, can I select one that isn't currently on the map?
- mrktsm__ 7mo agoAbout 2,000 locations so far. Mapillary has a lot of imagery but finding the 360 panoramas is trickier since they are a lot rarer. I'm actively expanding coverage
- tkocmathla 7mo agoCool idea, but of course the very first image I clicked into was a dick.
- mrktsm__ 7mo agoHaha yeah, can't have nice things I guess. I'm currently working on automated moderation to catch that stuff faster. In the meantime, Report button exists if you stumble into anything awful.
- lukan 7mo agoI recently learned that in Bhutan, they are sacred smybols since a long time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phallus_paintings_in_Bhutan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phallus_paintings_in_Bhutan Since I know that, I am rather amused every time I see a dick painted anywhere.
- eternauta3k 7mo agoFirst thing I saw was a Swastika. It was painted on an ex Nazi building, but still...
- SanjayMehta 7mo agoA swastika or a Hakenkreuz?
- KellyCriterion 7mo agoMost people do not know about the directional-flip in these signs
- SanjayMehta 7mo agoThe Hakenkreuz is tilted at an angle. The Hindu and Buddhist symbols are very different.
- dghf 7mo ago
- builderhq_io 7mo ago[flagged]
- abrookewood 7mo agoA long, long time ago ... there was a browser extension or maybe an iframe, that allowed you to "comment" on public websites. Of course you weren't really commenting on the actual website, just some form of overlay. Anyway, it quickly devolved into lawsuits and rude comments if I recall correctly.
- Teddy_Kord 7mo agoDo you remember any details about the name of the software, or the cause of the lawsuits? I had a similar idea, funny to hear it's been done and ended so badly.
- chromakode 7mo agoI don't recall any lawsuits, but whytheluckystiff made one 20 years ago. https://ruby-talk.ruby-lang.narkive.com/buiXXTZh/what-is-hoodwink-d https://ruby-talk.ruby-lang.narkive.com/buiXXTZh/what-is-hoo...
- rtwk 7mo agoI believe it was https://web.hypothes.is/ https://web.hypothes.is/
- gamesieve 7mo agoDon't know if it matches with the lawsuits, but could've been Third Voice (1999-2001).
- abrookewood 7mo agoIt was so long ago, I literally have no idea. Sorry
- JimDabell 7mo agoThere have been several efforts. At one point the W3C were working on a standard protocol for it: https://www.w3.org/annotation/ https://www.w3.org/annotation/
- nasso_dev 7mo ago
- doctorhandshake 7mo agoIt is my belief that a time may come when we can all ‘write’ on, or link information to, any person, place, or thing, based on a melange of semantic anchors, and in that world there will be fewer secrets and more experts.
- pcthrowaway 7mo agoI used this one called "Gooey" in 1999 that let you have a realtime chat with people on the same page as you: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/maker-of-gooey-chat-finds-buyer/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/maker-of-goo...
- qezz 7mo agoIt's not very obvious which places are available for drawing. At first I thought it pulls Google street view, so I just zoomed in to some place I visited recently, but there was nothing. So it turned out the spots on the map are actually the available panoramas, and not just a heatmap of the signatures. Cool idea overall!
- behehebd 7mo agoNice but come on paying 3.99 for more ink. You HP?
- seweso 7mo agoWhy are places marked which have zero strokes? Why is the heatmap activating for places without strokes? Is something going wrong?
- mrktsm__ 7mo agoYeah, I see that does seem confusing. The heatmap currently shows all available locations, not just ones with strokes. I need to think through the UX more like trying to balance showing coverage with making it obvious where actual drawings are. Thanks for the feedback!
- herghost 7mo agoOk, I give up. How am I supposed to draw something?
- mrktsm__ 7mo agoSorry about that, just upgraded the infra. Try reloading the page!
- herghost 7mo agoI might be missing something obvious but there only appears to be the option to draw something in predefined places - where the bubbles appear on the map. I'm trying to mark up somewhere new that doesn't have a bubble and I can't see how I'm supposed to do that.
- mrktsm__ 7mo agoRight now it's limited to ~2,000 curated panorama locations. You can only draw at existing bubbles on the map. I'm working on expanding coverage, but if you have a spot or location you'd love to see added, let me know :)
- lfx 7mo agoCool idea, but you should consider required auth to ban trolls. On other hand, I wonder why many pictures are in the middle of the bridges or viaducts?
- mrktsm__ 7mo agoYou may be right, I may need auth down the line. I wanted to reduce friction and let people draw right away though. I think the bridges thing is an artifact of Mapillary, the API I use for panoramas. Dashcams tend to overrepresent highways. Working on better curation.
- JanoMartinez 7mo agoThis is a really cool concept. I like the idea of turning the map into a kind of shared canvas. The fact that the strokes wrap around the 3D geometry instead of just being a flat overlay is a really nice touch. Curious — how do you handle moderation or prevent drawings from turning into spam once more people start using it?
- mrktsm__ 7mo agoThanks! There's a report button if you hold on any drawing, plus I have admin tools to delete flagged stuff. Working on automated moderation to catch things faster as it scales
- jasonjmcghee 7mo agoNearly certain you're responding to an LLM
- lattrommi 7mo agoHow do you draw something? I can't seem to do anything but look, I even made an account. I went to look at the nearest locations to me with drawings but they all had nothing. I found the menu on the left side of the screen but that didn't do anything. To draw does it require becoming a paying subscriber?
- mrktsm__ 7mo agoYou should see a toolbar at the bottom with a pen/marker icon, tap either to start drawing. No payment needed, premium is really just to support the project.
- anon115 7mo agothe happy face on the sun lmaoooo
- onebit0fme 7mo agoKinda fun, it'd be more fun to explore any street view
- pwr1 7mo agoDigital/virtual graffiti. Just like in real life, you'll see good stuff and bad stuff.
- anon115 7mo agohow long did this take to ship?
- krishSingaria 7mo agoCool idea !! But a limited number of places which is understandable :)
- koher 7mo agoSuch a good idea, love it! How does moderation work though, in the case of certain writings or symbols that might need to be censored? Also would be cool to have more places available, from maybe Google street view?
- mrktsm__ 7mo agoModeration-wise, I have a dashboard where I can see all drawings and quickly delete anything bad. Users can also report stuff, and anything with enough reports gets auto-hidden. Looking into automating it more down the line as well.
- dylanhouli 7mo agoThat's really neat. I think it would be a lot more popular if there were more locations we could draw on, but I get why it takes time to add new ones. Makes me wonder if something similar to this exists but just more of a "draw all over the globe" type of thing. No street view, just satellite view