WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]
top | item 7130192

Show HN: Random Street View

356 points| hanezz | 12 years ago |randomstreetview.com | reply

166 comments

order
[+] kirchhoff|12 years ago|reply
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.

[+] debt|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] Timothee|12 years ago|reply
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.

[+] pachydermic|12 years ago|reply
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.

[+] padmanabh|12 years ago|reply
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.

[1] locatestreet.com

[+] grimgrin|12 years ago|reply
Any thoughts to have the defined searched represented in the URL, so that I can link to say, my city's randomized street view?

By default Random Street View puts the country in the url, which is sort of what I'm talking about.

Also you should maybe do a full screen thing (aka minimize the UI), like Random Street View.

http://randomstreetview.com/se#fullscreen

[+] RogerL|12 years ago|reply
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.

Firefox 26.0, Windows 7

[+] awongh|12 years ago|reply
map crunch is awesome. I was totally obsessed with it for a while last year.
[+] crazygringo|12 years ago|reply
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.]

[+] JasonFruit|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] magicalist|12 years ago|reply
> 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.

[+] ohwp|12 years ago|reply
"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 ... ;)

[+] itomatik|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] colinbartlett|12 years ago|reply
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."

[+] erikig|12 years ago|reply
Google'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

[+] ericgoldberg|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] RankingMember|12 years ago|reply
There's definitely something intriguing about seeing random mundane scenes (with occasional awesome exceptions) in far away locations.
[+] JackFr|12 years ago|reply
I found it weirdly compelling.
[+] morganwilde|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] NDizzle|12 years ago|reply
It 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.

[+] petercooper|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] gtCameron|12 years ago|reply
Not 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/

[+] jimmaswell|12 years ago|reply
I played a game like that once and happened to land right next to a sign that said it was the border between 2 states.
[+] 3rd3|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] noonespecial|12 years ago|reply
If there is, its German, has 30 letters and contains "welt".
[+] time0|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] hanezz|12 years ago|reply
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 :)
[+] DanBC|12 years ago|reply
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

[+] james33|12 years ago|reply
Does it actually pick a completely random spot? Because the first one it showed me was a place I visited recently halfway around the world.
[+] asd|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] Patrick_Devine|12 years ago|reply
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.

[+] nader|12 years ago|reply
Even though I mostly end up in the middle of nowhere this surely makes me want to travel :)
[+] mdisraeli|12 years ago|reply
There'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....

[+] megalomanu|12 years ago|reply
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/