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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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?
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 :)
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.