15 ms·
Show HN: Random Street View
- petercooper 13y agoThere'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.
- gtCameron 13y agoNot 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/ http://geoguessr.com/
- jimmaswell 13y agoI played a game like that once and happened to land right next to a sign that said it was the border between 2 states.
- 0x0 13y agoStrangely hypnotizing! Fun!
- lewispollard 13y agoI chose United Kingdom and on the second click it showed a street in my childhood hometown!
- ishener 13y agokudos for the mobile support that's what i'm going to do on my ride home today
- RankingMember 13y agoThere's definitely something intriguing about seeing random mundane scenes (with occasional awesome exceptions) in far away locations.
- JackFr 13y agoI found it weirdly compelling.
- morganwilde 13y agoIt'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.
- euphemize 13y agoexactly my thoughts.
- NDizzle 13y agoIt 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.
- henrik_w 13y agoNeat! There was a similar project here a few years ago: http://www.mapcrunch.com/ http://www.mapcrunch.com/ comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3215460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3215460
- colinbartlett 13y agoI 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."
- erikig 13y agoGoogle'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
- ohwp 13y agoWhat 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/20130502024505-9947747-google-s-self-driving-car-gathers-nearly-1-gb-per-second http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130502024505-99... EDIT 2: Here a video of the presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXylqtEQ0tk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXylqtEQ0tk @ 3:30 you can see the generated (and stored) point cloud.
- DanBC 13y agoThat 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?
- 3rd3 13y agoThat 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.
- blueblob 13y ago
- sz4kerto 13y agoWow, the second random street is in my hometown.
- nyrina 13y agoYou've gotta get a tinfoil hat, or a lottery ticket. Perhaps both.
- BenjaminN 13y agoHey, did you get the idea after seeing http://smwh.re http://smwh.re ?
- ak217 13y agohttp://geoguessr.com/ http://geoguessr.com/
- chrisBob 13y agoRandom street view is like geo-guesser, just less fun.
- patrickdavey 13y agoHad 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 :)
- pavel_lishin 13y agoI felt like a disproportionate amount of mine were in Australia.
- follower626 13y agohttp://www.whereamidriving.com/ http://www.whereamidriving.com/ same concept as geoguessr but it's easier I guess because it's multiple choice.
- time0 13y agoWhat'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.
- hanezz 13y agoRandom 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 :)
- djulius 13y agoGot 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.
- hanezz 13y agoPeru just solved as well :)
- kirchhoff 13y agoIf you are storing individual views in a DB, it will not be random, as there are far too many to store.
- van_hn 13y agoNot random.
- jader201 13y agoSome interesting non-street views in there: http://randomstreetview.com/#fnso2_17h6mm_b0_a_-8 http://randomstreetview.com/#fnso2_17h6mm_b0_a_-8 http://randomstreetview.com/#68vsh_19xpmm_100_a_-1 http://randomstreetview.com/#68vsh_19xpmm_100_a_-1 http://randomstreetview.com/#vbpgr_60bxi_b6_a_-1 http://randomstreetview.com/#vbpgr_60bxi_b6_a_-1 http://randomstreetview.com/#953ql_19j07c_1ix_a_-g http://randomstreetview.com/#953ql_19j07c_1ix_a_-g
- nyrina 13y agoAre these user submitted or has google actually been there?
- jader201 13y agoAccording 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Street_View
- jcutrell 13y agoCheck out this sweet dragon. http://randomstreetview.com/#wrua5_dhcmy_2m_a_-3 http://randomstreetview.com/#wrua5_dhcmy_2m_a_-3 Seriously, this is a fantastic thing you've made. I'm enjoying it immediately.
- gk1 13y agoAmazing. 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.
- jader201 13y agoIt'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 http://randomstreetview.com/#-6p0t9_-nfxtl_qa_a_-2
- DanBC 13y agoI'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 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03s6mf0
- RogerL 13y agoHmm, 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 http://randomstreetview.com/#p0sb5_f2nu7_p7_a_-f
- sdegutis 13y agoIt's really awesome to see how much of the world looks almost exactly like my street.
- nader 13y agoEven though I mostly end up in the middle of nowhere this surely makes me want to travel :)
- james33 13y agoDoes it actually pick a completely random spot? Because the first one it showed me was a place I visited recently halfway around the world.
- keammo1 13y agoGreat! 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.
- frogpelt 13y agoAt 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.
- asd 13y agoI've been enjoying a similar site, http://www.mapcrunch.com/ 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.
- jonheller 13y agoThis is really awesome, thanks!
- lhgaghl 13y agoHow 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.
- timdorr 13y agoIt'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.
- lhgaghl 13y agoBut 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?
- Raphmedia 13y agoI think that the map without flash is still gradually rolling out, but you can apply to have it.
- MichaelTieso 13y agoThis would be pretty awesome as a screensaver.
- hanezz 13y agoTry http://randomstreetview.com/#slideshow http://randomstreetview.com/#slideshow , and switch your browser to fullscreen modus.
- ericgoldberg 13y agoThat'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.
- glanch 13y agoCheck this out. Apparently it's a Google employee walking on foot.. in Bangalore.. with a government official trailing him every step of the way. I walked around for a while and got bored, but every step I took, the guy was right behind me: http://randomstreetview.com/#7q78d_1a77zm_1lb_a_-7 http://randomstreetview.com/#7q78d_1a77zm_1lb_a_-7
- joelcollinsdc 13y agobeen around longer and funner: http://www.geoguessr.com/ http://www.geoguessr.com/
- arianvanp 13y agoI 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.
- rlu 13y agoYes!!! 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).
- dextimilus 13y agogood idea!
- kitsched 13y agoI 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.
- kirchhoff 13y agoYou can do this on www.mapcrunch.com
- megalomanu 13y agoWonderful ! 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/ http://dreamlands-virtual-tour.blogspot.fr/
- cek 13y agoCool. Within a few minutes of clicking NEXT I started getting duplicates.
- giarc 13y agoI might have found the most English looking location (also very beautiful) http://randomstreetview.com/#vmyhk_-2h1og_4l_a_-g http://randomstreetview.com/#vmyhk_-2h1og_4l_a_-g
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- olivernn 13y agoWho'd have thought the most English looking location would be in Wales ;)
- polymatter 13y agoIts very beautiful, but that's in Wales.
- SpaceRaccoon 13y agoDamn, how this makes me yearn to leave the suburbs
- sushirain 13y agoI was surprised to see that most street-views in the world are rural.
- rokhayakebe 13y agoYes. Check Ukraine.
- iandanforth 13y agoThis 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.
- state 13y agoI 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.
- n_coats 13y agoReally enjoying this! Thanks for building!
- samolang 13y agoThis would make an awesome wallpaper/screen saver.
- hanezz 13y agohttp://randomstreetview.com/#slideshow http://randomstreetview.com/#slideshow
- clark-kent 13y agoawesome, it would be sweet if the slideshow does a fade in/fade out.
- gourneau 13y agoHey Y'all on OS X. Just compile this little tool https://github.com/liquidx/webviewscreensaver https://github.com/liquidx/webviewscreensaver Then add the url http://randomstreetview.com/#slideshow http://randomstreetview.com/#slideshow to the url playlist of the screen saver. Or get the binary here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/c03r77x5vm1wirp/WebViewScreenSaver.saver.zip 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.
- earlz 13y agoI didn't even know that Google had street view cars in rural Africa! http://randomstreetview.com/#-en562_fdoqw_-2i_a_-7 http://randomstreetview.com/#-en562_fdoqw_-2i_a_-7
- willismichael 13y agoDenmark 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 http://randomstreetview.com/#xqgi5_5um0z_64_d_-7
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- 3rd3 13y agoIt’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?
- noonespecial 13y agoIf there is, its German, has 30 letters and contains "welt".
- anvandare 13y agoDo you mean "sonder"? http://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/23536922667/sonder http://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/23536922667/s...
- 3rd3 13y agoYes! Thanks.
- shangxiao 13y agoLove it. Could be the source for some interesting social activities.
- rokhayakebe 13y agoCan we go by city? PLEASE. I think you could charge something for this. Maybe a one-time fee.
- crazygringo 13y agoNice! 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.]
- JasonFruit 13y agoNo, 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.
- hueving 13y agoI second this. Cities get boring pretty quickly.
- leeview 13y agoOK, 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.
- JasonFruit 13y agoNope; 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.
- kirchhoff 13y agoI 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 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.
- RogerL 13y agoI 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
- kirchhoff 13y agoHeh, 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?
- RogerL 13y agoYes. 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.
- michelutti 13y agoOk 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?
- gamerDude 13y agoI would love to see a like feature here to aggregate the most amazing pics around the world.
- Patrick_Devine 13y agoI 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.
- tomatohs 13y agoI 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/ http://sm.rutgers.edu/thebeat/
- nathan_f77 13y agoMy colleague just showed me http://geoguessr.com/ http://geoguessr.com/, which is a pretty fun twist on the same concept.
- callesgg 13y agoAmazing :) An auto turner and a timmer would be nice.
- lelandbatey 13y agoWow, it only took me two clicks to get a glitched out shot : http://randomstreetview.com/#p6d4o_-4vsu8_93_a_4 http://randomstreetview.com/#p6d4o_-4vsu8_93_a_4
- l-p 13y agoWell, is really does what it says, that _was_ random: http://randomstreetview.com/#phyzb_dnid7_-d_r_-5 http://randomstreetview.com/#phyzb_dnid7_-d_r_-5
- hawkharris 13y agoI'm curious: has Google used any of its autonomous vehicles to perform mapping for Street View?
- acdanger 13y agoA non-random Street View project that has some very interesting images. http://9-eyes.com/ http://9-eyes.com/
- mdisraeli 13y agoThere'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....
- finishingmove 13y agoOr 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
- aabalkan 13y agoI guess I hit the API limit very quickly after 20-30 tries. Map does not refresh anymore.
- brak2718 13y agoThis site does the same thing and has been around atleast a few years: http://www.globegenie.com/ http://www.globegenie.com/
- beefsack 13y agoReminds me of the fantastic game based around random street view: http://geoguessr.com/ http://geoguessr.com/
- plaguuuuuu 13y agoThis was pretty cool http://randomstreetview.com/#m19t2_-1xxgr6_-o_a_-7 http://randomstreetview.com/#m19t2_-1xxgr6_-o_a_-7
- PedroBatista 13y agoGreat, i landed in the middle of nowhere in Oklahoma. Story of my life...
- andys627 13y agoWould be cool if it gave you a slow 360 view instead of just a random side of the road. Good job!
- frozenport 13y agoYou should weight the streets by population, as that is what people "experience".
- pwenzel 13y agoSimple. Enjoyable. I just found several dozen places I want to travel to.
- ivanbrussik 13y agoI don't see North Korea?
- SonicSoul 13y agoreminds 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 http://www.abulsme.com/trip/spottool.html this is a clear upgrade :)
- xixi77 13y agoInteresting! 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.)
- hanezz 13y agoA 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!
- sytelus 13y agoYou 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!
- timpattinson 13y agoThat assumes that Google hasn't prioritized areas with higher population for Street View photography.
- shotwell 13y agoThat's a great idea. It'd make for a great education app, perhaps walking the user through the solution for their own town.
- DigitalSea 13y agoThis 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!
- petern 13y agoIf 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 http://www.mapillary.com/map/im/jvEX_s9fM7SwTDoMdeYDOw - works everywhere where you can have a smartphone and GPS fix.
- divinity 13y agoThis was on mobile as a game a while ago https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/map-mayhem/id608008620?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/map-mayhem/id608008620?mt=8