I lived in Tokyo for a year and my favorite hobby was taking the train somewhere about 10 miles from home then just wandering around, vaguely towards home. It's such a beautiful walkable city, and the safety means you don't need to worry about much at all. I usually walked at night and I would come across drunk people stumbling home, pets (and rodents!) roaming the streets, construction in the middle of the night, strange open late restaurants / bars, and all kinds of other things. Living in Japan has its downsides but that activity was a nice reminder of what a cool place it is. I continue going back every year just to explore new little places I've never gone. I recommend anyone who visits to find some time to just wander around. Pick a destination and walk there and see what you find.
dkurth 3 hours ago [-]
In 2009, Google Street View had only been gathering images in Austin for about a year, I think. I pulled up right behind the Street View car at a red light, and I waved out the window, hoping that would get captured. I sent an email to my friends with a link to the location and said, "check this out in a couple of months!"
When I checked later that year, there was no image of me, so I thought the camera had not been active, and I forgot all about it.
Then, while looking through old emails a couple of weeks ago, I found that one and clicked the link. I clicked to see images from 2009, and sure enough, there was my little white Honda. And when I moved around the map, I found an image where my hand was out the window, waving! It was like I was waving to myself from the past. Pretty neat!
I have a picture of my car in street view photo made by Bing. Sold the car long ago, nice keepsake.
rambambram 5 hours ago [-]
I had to click this title!
For some months now I do basically the same, but without the clicking in Streetview. There are some channels on Youtube where someone walks through neighborhoods in Tokyo, I found I really enjoy these. The streets are so clean and the houses so beautiful. Indeed, once in a while a Japanese sports car pops up around a corner, just standing there on somebody's driveway.
I also enjoy the walk-throughs of neighborhoods in New York (edit: now that I think about it, this started with following ari@home, a streamer who makes electronic music on the fly while walking and having an open mic). I tried Dallas once, I guess, but it was all way too big and bulky (but it was down town I guess, so that's to be expected of a lot of cities on this planet).
Does anybody have ideas for other nice spots on this beautiful planet!? I think I know Tokyo by now. ;)
FuriouslyAdrift 4 hours ago [-]
Lee Chapman does actual photo-walking tours of Tokyo and Osaka... sign ups are going on right now!
> Indeed, once in a while a Japanese sports car pops up around a corner, just standing there on somebody's driveway.
I worked for a Japanese company. My Japanese coworkers would do the exact same thing in cities like Miami. When they visited here, we saw a drop top Mustang and that was a bigger deal to them than any Porsche or Lambo.
rambambram 3 hours ago [-]
I'm from Europe and back in 2002 I visited Washington DC (first and only visit of USA). I can fully understand why people gasp at American cars. I vividly remember spotting a Ford Thunderbird (the Retro Bird of 2001-2005) in the wild, a car that I only knew from pictures.
karlgkk 3 hours ago [-]
Did you know that you can’t really get a sedan that can tow in the US anymore? How are those sedans with the exact same models sold in the EU, but they’re just not rated for towing (and using them for towing makes them uninsurable)
So to me, my big grin is when I see a bmw 328i hauling a trailer.
obmelvin 2 hours ago [-]
A few years ago while driving/moving from IL back to CA, I saw a Polaris Slingshot towing a U-Haul trailer across Illinois, Iowa and then we saw it again in Nebraska later that day. It was awesome!!
I probably have a picture if anyone really wants to see (I am definitely a car spotter)
rambambram 3 hours ago [-]
Sounds like some American car brands protect their interests here. ;) I have even seen Smart cars towing (small) trailers here in The Netherlands, although that's extreme. But even today I helped a woman coupling a one-axle trailer (3mtr long) to her VW Polo, which is pretty common to see.
Sibiu and Brasov in Romania; Krakow in Poland; Guanajuato, Zacatecas, San Miguel, Patzcuaro in Mexico; Merida and Campeche in Mexico (very different vibes, so separated), possibly Regensburg and Heidelberg in Germany
rambambram 2 hours ago [-]
Thanks!
tasoeur 4 hours ago [-]
Hello fellow flâneur! Though you won’t get the same level of safety, I definitely recommend Paris as a destination to walk around. The city feels like a museum and you can end up finding all sort of random monuments and beautiful architecture along the way. Also some cool street art.
Obviously use common sense and you’ll be fine.
PS: I did Tokyo quite a lot, Shanghai too, though you usually need to take the metro at some point. San Francisco is also great if you don’t mind the hills (and also use common sense).
rambambram 2 hours ago [-]
You're talking about digital walking, or real walking? I real-walked in Paris by night (around Moulin Rouge) and it was definitely a memorable evening. Taking a boat trip by day was also museum-like.
seizethecheese 3 hours ago [-]
It’s fun to go to random places not know for their beauty, too. There are walking tour videos of basically everywhere. New Delhi and Huancayo are ones I recall finding interesting
rambambram 2 hours ago [-]
When I need some energy boost - or energy drain - I check videos of very busy streets in India or Bangladesh. So interesting, but within 10 minutes I'm tired as hell because of all the noise and movement.
MrGilbert 4 hours ago [-]
For a long time, there was a livestream on Youtube that showed a part of Tokyo. Not sure which part, but there was a highway and railroad. And it was somehow soothing to me, because if it was night here, the sun would rise there. I always imagined myself there. I miss this stream.
Many years ago I stumbled across a webcam from an outdoor go cart track somewhere in Japan, and I was watching it a little bit. It was an internet connected webcam, rather than YouTube or anything like that. I still think about that place sometimes but I have no idea where in Japan it was, and no clear details about it to find it again.
Vinnl 2 hours ago [-]
There are many old and very walkable cities in the Netherlands, any of the larger ones would probably be nice.
the_sleaze_ 3 hours ago [-]
Nice, Colmar, Basil, sections of Paris, Vienna, Barcelona and Madrid.
llm_nerd 3 hours ago [-]
Those FPV walks through various Japanese area videos, from channels like @4KJAPAN or @VIRTUALJAPAN, are strange because they actually make me feel like I've been there.
Like I have a memory of walking through Japan and it can be a bit jarring when I realize it was just a video I watched.
It feels as real to me as actual cities I've walked through. Like I remember my "walks" through various Japanese areas more vividly than my walks through Florence, Italy, or Brussels, Belgium, but I've actually been to the latter two.
rambambram 2 hours ago [-]
I agree! A combination of the slowness of walking an me being able to take everything in while lazily sitting on my chair, it definitely does something. Even the sounds, like the humming of aircos(?) and the tunes they play near stations or crossings, get pretty vivid this way.
JKCalhoun 4 hours ago [-]
A lot of Slow TV of trains rolling through Norway.
leptons 4 hours ago [-]
This is basically all I did during covid lockdowns, with a Quest VR headset. I explored the world. Spend afternoons in Paris, France and then I'm in Venice Italy. The neat thing is some of the museums in these cities have walk-throughs, so I got to visit a lot of museums too, as if I was walking around inside them looking around in VR.
Then I got an app for the VR headset that connected to a bike pedal sensor, and I rode a stationary bike all over the place. That was a lot of fun while being stuck inside for months.
mrbonner 4 hours ago [-]
I really like this setup. Coukd you share a bit about the hardware and software in case we want to replicate? Thanks for sharing!
You buy whatever bluetooth pedal sensor they reccomend and pair it woth the VR headset. It's been years since I used it, so I don't really remember more details than this.
harpersealtako 2 hours ago [-]
The Philippines is great for streetview, wikipedia, random internet rabbit holes. You can just zoom in until you find some island somewhere and there's probably something interesting you can learn about it. If you're lucky there's a road with streetview on it, maybe a village, a church, etc. You can spend hours trying to figure out what's going on there.
Many of the islands don't even have wikipedia pages. You can spend hours just scouring the internet for information on what the heck is going on on some island. Sometimes you find the amateur website for a local school, or some account of a tourist or traveler going there and reporting what they found.
Sometimes you learn that there is an old Spanish graveyard that has since sunken underwater, the statues and tombstones and crosses now covered in coral and barnacles, with a single lone cross still visible above the sea.
Sometimes you learn that the village is a sprawling shantytown of fishing huts and thatched-roof shacks on precarious stilts 15 feet above the ocean.
Sometimes you learn that it's the site of a WWII battle or famous explorer visited the island or a plane crashed there in the 60s or some other interesting tidbit.
Sometimes you learn that it's been occupied by jihadist terrorists for the past 40 years and that in order to encourage foreign visitors (who might not want to go there due to numerous past kidnappings of foreigners for ransom), tourists are assigned a free, mandatory vanguard of heavily armed marine commandos as human shields to defend them whenever they go to the beach.
Sometimes you find a remote archipelago where every island seems to have a different christian denomination on it, like you have the island with the Mormon church, the one with the Catholic church, the one with the Iglesia ni Cristo church, the one with the Seventh Day Adventists, etc. etc. and you start to wonder how exactly that happened, and what the locals think about the weirdos on the island next door who got a very different story from the missionaries that came there than they did.
Sometimes it's just so obscure nobody has ever written anything about it in any language you know, you can see some blurry houses and rice paddies and outrigger canoes on the beach on satellite view but the village is otherwise unmarked, and you start to wonder, exactly what goes on there? Who are these people in this strange little fishing village with their canoes and rice paddies and corrugated-iron roof huts, what are they hiding, and how do I get there? And pretty soon you start looking at plane tickets and schedules and trying to imagine the complicated and uncertain logistics of traveling to such a remote place, because surely it's not that hard, there is an island only 30 miles away with an airstrip, beach villas and a handful of restaurants, and surely you could just fly there and charter a boat or something...
rambambram 2 hours ago [-]
Thanks, I also liked walking Manila on Youtube. Interesting place!
N7lo4nl34akaoSN 31 minutes ago [-]
If you've talked to ChatGPT enough this is instantly recognizable as AI writing. It's this kind of romantic hacker poetic ad copy thing. The short little punchy sentences. The sentence fragments. The repetition. The new age Instagram drama: flash talk for goddesses and sunsets.
I guess it works! But it's gross. lol.
EvanAnderson 23 hours ago [-]
I appreciate this hobby.
I've visited San Francsico a few times but haven't been since 2007.
At one point, back in about 2013 or 2014, I got a little bit obsessed with the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct. It started innocently enough (reading an article about the Pulgas Water Temple), and I ended up spending many evenings in bed using Google Earth and Google Maps street view to trace the route of the aqueduct and look at the things around it. Where the pipes run under cities it's easy to see their "mark" on the land (since no permanent structures are permitted to be built above them). Following them up into the mountains was fun, too.
A few years later I got into looking at abandoned rail lines in the Midwest and spent evenings "flying" the routes of old railroads. They're similar to the aqueduct insofar as you can see the "scar" they've left on the (and in the oddly-shaped parcels of land left after they were sold-off).
metalliqaz 5 hours ago [-]
I do the same thing with streams and other wetlands in my area. Another interesting Google Maps curiosity is the 'overpass to nowhere'[1] over I-84 in Farmington, CT.
When I do this with places I've lived in before, especially in other states or countries, the nostalgia is so strong that it hurts!
It's pretty crazy how we are able to expose ourselves to memories and experiences (normally inaccessible) in so much stronger ways than previous generations.
sbuttgereit 2 hours ago [-]
Many years ago, I found an image via Goggle that I used as a desktop image: an old copper stamp mill in Calumet MI[1]. That image had a ghost image in it and I got a little obsessed.
After more research than I should have ever put into this question, I found a copy of the photo responsible for the ghost image[2].
Not being able to leave things at that... I had to try and find where the photo had been taken in Google Maps and street view. And I did[3]!
Wandering around maps and street view I found a number of houses in the original photo that are still there, like [4]. The intersection that is front and center on the photo [2] is the current intersection of Oak St & Spruce St. The duplex home at the bend in that intersection, where the woman is walking in front, is still there, though clearly it's seen better days.
Definitely spent too much time, even if virtually, in Calumet, MI.
I remember doing something similar back on my graveyard job days, it was fun to see gas station supermarkets on random countries, still have a small place on my heart for the ones on Iceland
r0fl 35 minutes ago [-]
You should book a flight to Iceland and see them in person. It’s a great place to visit!
Take the adventure, life is short!
moomoo11 2 minutes ago [-]
me too.
i recently used street view to look at the places i lived in with my parents growing up.
we only ever lived in apartments, and i remember as a kid i was sometimes embarrassed (looking back it pains me i felt this way, because i was getting bullied at school over it) by our car for example which was a old mazda my dad purchased for like 2000 bucks. it was missing hub caps, rusting on the side doors.
but it was the car that my dad would drive to drop me off at school before commuting for almost an hour and 15 minutes to his job one way.
it was the car i learned how to drive. i remember the steering felt so good, i still miss the steering feel even tho now i've driven some really nice cars.
anyway.. i saw our old car and i actually cried. took screenshots of it, and put it in my iCloud.
sbarre 6 hours ago [-]
I've done this in Google Earth VR, and it's very fun. You can get down to basically street view, but everything is very blocky and blurry..
Or you can stay at "Godzilla scale" and walk around the city with buildings the (relative) size of appliances or furniture.. NYC is kind of fun that way.
If you are somewhere that you've been in real life, it's uncanny how familiar it still seems even at low res..
For somewhere you haven't been, or are planning on going, it can give you a sense of scale/scope/direction that is quite nice.
jerf 5 hours ago [-]
There's also a number of videos on YouTube with varying amounts of 3D or 180/360 of people just walking through all kinds of various tourist places without comment. From inside a VR headset, is it as good as visiting yourself? Of course not. But it's not the worst way to spend some time. And in my opinion it captures at least a little of the je ne sais quoi of visiting a place that watching a video on a screen does not. Not necessarily a lot. But non-zero.
kridsdale1 5 hours ago [-]
VR gives you SCALE in a way you simply can’t perceive on a flat screen. Going down in to the Hoover Dam in Earth VR is something else.
dajonker 5 hours ago [-]
This is a hobby of mine, too. It's one of the most fantastic things available on the internet. The ability to travel anywhere in the world and - as the author of the blog also said - the ability to travel back in time as well!
I did some road trips in 2009 and made pictures with a compact camera. I was able to determine the almost exact locations I shot these pictures thanks to street view, so I could see route that we took back then. One picture was shot in the dark but had a distinctive logo sign on the side of the road. Given the timestamp on the photo and the extremely blurry restaurant and motel logos on the sign, I had a good idea of where to look, but it turned out this sign was only up in a single year and it was quite hard to navigate to!
Unfortunately, I don't think you can "lock" the street view date? Nor does the map view on go back in time? I guess you can use Google Earth to view satellite images. There is a whole neighborhood in Seoul that's been completely leveled on the satellite pictures, yet you can still use street view from 2018 to travel around.
kqr 5 hours ago [-]
I have done this for places I visited a lot in my early childhood but since have never returned to. It's a bit eerie to see the memories come back to life. Often I remember just enough of the place to be able to find my way between what were the main attractions to me at that age. Somehow, despite forgetting all the details of the path, something in the back of my head compels me to follow the right road even in confusing intersections. I find it fascinating.
bobosola 1 hours ago [-]
Not Tokyo, but I put up a UK site a couple of years back with old maps going back to Victorian times. Search for "Knowle Winchester" and you'll see (in satellite view) a modern housing estate. But on the 1937-61 maps you can see it was built on the remains of a huge old mental hospital: Knowle Hospital. And on the 1888-1913 maps and you can see it was originally called County Lunatic Asylum! Both geography and language change substantially over time. I like chasing up old train lines with it. Geeky fun. https://solentmaps.uk
RoadieRoller 2 hours ago [-]
PlaneSpotting in Google Maps had been my favorite for many years. Somehow, I lost that interest now.
I do this sometimes too but the ux has always been lacking. Arrow key directions sometimes don't work if the system thinks the forward image is e.g. not actually forward. You try and resort to clicking, you might miss the click target and end up 600 yards down the road instead of to the next frame. Or you merely zoom in and don't move at all.
It has always been like this ever since they released streetview. I'm surprised they haven't improved it, but then again, maybe I am not surprised. Probably actually a good thing google hasn't felt compelled to touch it recently.
In unrelated news, I got a notice that they are killing google earth pro in January, so get your downloads in now before they stop sharing the packages.
jvvw 5 hours ago [-]
I recommend map-making-app for wandering around (https://map-making.app/) which is what all serious geoguessr players use.
SkyeCA 3 hours ago [-]
I do the same except with really bad countries as a reminder to myself of how much worse things could be.
mastazi 2 hours ago [-]
There is a specific Google Street picture in Rio De Janeiro, (in order to find it I need to go to a specific spot and then change the date to the time when I was living there), where I can see a friend who passed. His face has been blurred as usual, but to anyone who knew him, it's obvious it's him.
flowerlad 2 hours ago [-]
With Oculus VR headset on, you can walk through the streets.
The treadmills at my gym have a big display with YouTube. Each time I run for ~1 hour and watch one of those Walking Tour videos.
It's much easier to run with something to distract you from the pain of running. Time really flies by.
Tokyo is a great pick for this kind of thing. It's big, so I usually pick a specific neighborhood (Hiroo, Shibuya...).
josefresco 3 hours ago [-]
I did this for about 6 months but with marathons from around the world. I watched so many I started recognizing people! They get a little boring after a while so I stopped but it was cool seeing different cities and marathon routes.
indoordin0saur 3 hours ago [-]
Related, but has anyone else noticed that Maps has gotten really slow in the past several months? I don't think its just my internet connection. Not sure if Google is throttling it or its getting slammed by AI
rzzzt 3 hours ago [-]
Not sure when this changed, but for me it only shows opening times for places for the current day only, if you want to see the rest of the schedule you have to log in.
pixl97 3 hours ago [-]
I love doing this for food in particular. Seeing how and what other countries eat is just really fun for me. Even though I won't be able to visit most of these places it quite often leads me to new local restaurants or new things to cook.
mindtricks 2 hours ago [-]
I've always recommended to people traveling to Tokyo to just walk around. Hit your spots, but walk when and where you can. You'll almost always stumble into some pocket of peace there.
hycaria 4 hours ago [-]
I use google maps at least 15 minutes a day. At least.
Mostly looking at places I know, drove through and intrigued me, etc.
I can tell when the satellite picture changes. I once saw a plane that was captured in the views (it got edited out soon after).
I just love Google Maps.
asphodele 52 minutes ago [-]
If you like going through the historical back catalogue of original satellite images for a place you can try Lucky Satellite Pic [1]. There are often clouds but sometimes you will hit upon a gem. Apropos of another post in this thread that mentioned Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct here is an example [2]
I've spent hours doing this in Google Earth VR. The city is just so damn walkable and liveable on the street level, which comes through even in a headset. And it seems to go on in all directions forever. Amazing urbanism.
caycep 4 hours ago [-]
I wonder how we can get cities to build on a human scale. that is my dream for LA; that would involve massive zoning changes here and breaking up quite a bit of concrete...
krapp 37 minutes ago [-]
I use an app called Wander to do this in my Oculus Quest. With some lo-fi music it really helps with anxiety.
It really is fun just picking some random spot on the map, some random neighborhood no tourist would ever think to visit, and poking around.
I actually had a hobby of posting "virtual vacation pictures" for a while. Not any attempt at a business or going viral or anything, just literally cool things I found and took pictures of. No one cared but I thought it was cool.
I just wish it could actually export 3D videos in 16:9 format.
eightturn 4 hours ago [-]
reminds me of this scene from the movie 'Smoke' where Auggie shares his photo scrapbook of the same corner, day after day, and his friend being confused by the repetition, but Auggie explaining his view of things... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGV_h36uZ5E
dylanhouli 5 hours ago [-]
Sometimes I'll do something similar and go back to old streets I used to live on, or the street I current live on but look at it in the past. Google Maps is a cool time capsule
sixothree 6 hours ago [-]
I watch a lot of videos of people just exploring Tokyo and other cities on foot. Good stuff.
ccozan 3 hours ago [-]
I found on YT a lot of videos driving through Tokyo. At first, I thought is very big and messy. The more I watched, it clicked how is organized ( the ring around it, the main streets, the neighbourhoods, etc ).
After a week, it had the strange sensation I am living in Tokyo , since I was involuntarily remembering flashes of streets or corners. Even now, after months, I can close my eyes and see them, like a real memory of walking down that streets.
forinti 4 hours ago [-]
There are tons of videos of people walking around Japan. I usually watch them while working out.
miyuru 5 hours ago [-]
I sometimes watch those walking videos after visiting the city. Its whole different feeling than watching random video.
dominotw 5 hours ago [-]
I've been watching lot of brazil vidoes. Man that country is not very good looking but its fascinating to watch.
vatsachak 1 hours ago [-]
Gaijin moment
iikareem 4 hours ago [-]
Haha, that’s actually a really cool hobby and the 350Z story makes it even more interesting
sbucco 2 hours ago [-]
Me too! :)
4 hours ago [-]
5 hours ago [-]
Razengan 3 hours ago [-]
I love doing this, in every city, even without Google Maps!
ksudb 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 23:38:43 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
When I checked later that year, there was no image of me, so I thought the camera had not been active, and I forgot all about it.
Then, while looking through old emails a couple of weeks ago, I found that one and clicked the link. I clicked to see images from 2009, and sure enough, there was my little white Honda. And when I moved around the map, I found an image where my hand was out the window, waving! It was like I was waving to myself from the past. Pretty neat!
For some months now I do basically the same, but without the clicking in Streetview. There are some channels on Youtube where someone walks through neighborhoods in Tokyo, I found I really enjoy these. The streets are so clean and the houses so beautiful. Indeed, once in a while a Japanese sports car pops up around a corner, just standing there on somebody's driveway.
I also enjoy the walk-throughs of neighborhoods in New York (edit: now that I think about it, this started with following ari@home, a streamer who makes electronic music on the fly while walking and having an open mic). I tried Dallas once, I guess, but it was all way too big and bulky (but it was down town I guess, so that's to be expected of a lot of cities on this planet).
Does anybody have ideas for other nice spots on this beautiful planet!? I think I know Tokyo by now. ;)
https://leechapman.photos/tokyo-photowalk-tours
http://edition.cnn.com/videos/travel/2016/08/11/tokyo-pov-le...
I worked for a Japanese company. My Japanese coworkers would do the exact same thing in cities like Miami. When they visited here, we saw a drop top Mustang and that was a bigger deal to them than any Porsche or Lambo.
So to me, my big grin is when I see a bmw 328i hauling a trailer.
I probably have a picture if anyone really wants to see (I am definitely a car spotter)
PS: I did Tokyo quite a lot, Shanghai too, though you usually need to take the metro at some point. San Francisco is also great if you don’t mind the hills (and also use common sense).
Looks like it's not streaming live any more, but there are a few short recordings of that livestream on it.
As for the location: https://www.google.com/maps/place//@35.6621727,139.7579444,1...
Like I have a memory of walking through Japan and it can be a bit jarring when I realize it was just a video I watched.
It feels as real to me as actual cities I've walked through. Like I remember my "walks" through various Japanese areas more vividly than my walks through Florence, Italy, or Brussels, Belgium, but I've actually been to the latter two.
Then I got an app for the VR headset that connected to a bike pedal sensor, and I rode a stationary bike all over the place. That was a lot of fun while being stuck inside for months.
You buy whatever bluetooth pedal sensor they reccomend and pair it woth the VR headset. It's been years since I used it, so I don't really remember more details than this.
Many of the islands don't even have wikipedia pages. You can spend hours just scouring the internet for information on what the heck is going on on some island. Sometimes you find the amateur website for a local school, or some account of a tourist or traveler going there and reporting what they found.
Sometimes you learn that there is an old Spanish graveyard that has since sunken underwater, the statues and tombstones and crosses now covered in coral and barnacles, with a single lone cross still visible above the sea.
Sometimes you learn that the village is a sprawling shantytown of fishing huts and thatched-roof shacks on precarious stilts 15 feet above the ocean.
Sometimes you learn that it's the site of a WWII battle or famous explorer visited the island or a plane crashed there in the 60s or some other interesting tidbit.
Sometimes you learn that it's been occupied by jihadist terrorists for the past 40 years and that in order to encourage foreign visitors (who might not want to go there due to numerous past kidnappings of foreigners for ransom), tourists are assigned a free, mandatory vanguard of heavily armed marine commandos as human shields to defend them whenever they go to the beach.
Sometimes you find a remote archipelago where every island seems to have a different christian denomination on it, like you have the island with the Mormon church, the one with the Catholic church, the one with the Iglesia ni Cristo church, the one with the Seventh Day Adventists, etc. etc. and you start to wonder how exactly that happened, and what the locals think about the weirdos on the island next door who got a very different story from the missionaries that came there than they did.
Sometimes it's just so obscure nobody has ever written anything about it in any language you know, you can see some blurry houses and rice paddies and outrigger canoes on the beach on satellite view but the village is otherwise unmarked, and you start to wonder, exactly what goes on there? Who are these people in this strange little fishing village with their canoes and rice paddies and corrugated-iron roof huts, what are they hiding, and how do I get there? And pretty soon you start looking at plane tickets and schedules and trying to imagine the complicated and uncertain logistics of traveling to such a remote place, because surely it's not that hard, there is an island only 30 miles away with an airstrip, beach villas and a handful of restaurants, and surely you could just fly there and charter a boat or something...
I guess it works! But it's gross. lol.
I've visited San Francsico a few times but haven't been since 2007.
At one point, back in about 2013 or 2014, I got a little bit obsessed with the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct. It started innocently enough (reading an article about the Pulgas Water Temple), and I ended up spending many evenings in bed using Google Earth and Google Maps street view to trace the route of the aqueduct and look at the things around it. Where the pipes run under cities it's easy to see their "mark" on the land (since no permanent structures are permitted to be built above them). Following them up into the mountains was fun, too.
A few years later I got into looking at abandoned rail lines in the Midwest and spent evenings "flying" the routes of old railroads. They're similar to the aqueduct insofar as you can see the "scar" they've left on the (and in the oddly-shaped parcels of land left after they were sold-off).
[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/QUgug3fwmPeAC2Wu8
It's pretty crazy how we are able to expose ourselves to memories and experiences (normally inaccessible) in so much stronger ways than previous generations.
After more research than I should have ever put into this question, I found a copy of the photo responsible for the ghost image[2].
Not being able to leave things at that... I had to try and find where the photo had been taken in Google Maps and street view. And I did[3]!
Wandering around maps and street view I found a number of houses in the original photo that are still there, like [4]. The intersection that is front and center on the photo [2] is the current intersection of Oak St & Spruce St. The duplex home at the bend in that intersection, where the woman is walking in front, is still there, though clearly it's seen better days.
Definitely spent too much time, even if virtually, in Calumet, MI.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev...
[2] https://www.shorpy.com/node/11417
[3] http://goo.gl/maps/xYctZ
[4] http://goo.gl/maps/BSkFj
Take the adventure, life is short!
i recently used street view to look at the places i lived in with my parents growing up.
we only ever lived in apartments, and i remember as a kid i was sometimes embarrassed (looking back it pains me i felt this way, because i was getting bullied at school over it) by our car for example which was a old mazda my dad purchased for like 2000 bucks. it was missing hub caps, rusting on the side doors.
but it was the car that my dad would drive to drop me off at school before commuting for almost an hour and 15 minutes to his job one way.
it was the car i learned how to drive. i remember the steering felt so good, i still miss the steering feel even tho now i've driven some really nice cars.
anyway.. i saw our old car and i actually cried. took screenshots of it, and put it in my iCloud.
Or you can stay at "Godzilla scale" and walk around the city with buildings the (relative) size of appliances or furniture.. NYC is kind of fun that way.
If you are somewhere that you've been in real life, it's uncanny how familiar it still seems even at low res..
For somewhere you haven't been, or are planning on going, it can give you a sense of scale/scope/direction that is quite nice.
I did some road trips in 2009 and made pictures with a compact camera. I was able to determine the almost exact locations I shot these pictures thanks to street view, so I could see route that we took back then. One picture was shot in the dark but had a distinctive logo sign on the side of the road. Given the timestamp on the photo and the extremely blurry restaurant and motel logos on the sign, I had a good idea of where to look, but it turned out this sign was only up in a single year and it was quite hard to navigate to!
Unfortunately, I don't think you can "lock" the street view date? Nor does the map view on go back in time? I guess you can use Google Earth to view satellite images. There is a whole neighborhood in Seoul that's been completely leveled on the satellite pictures, yet you can still use street view from 2018 to travel around.
https://discussions.flightaware.com/t/aircraft-in-flight-in-...
It has always been like this ever since they released streetview. I'm surprised they haven't improved it, but then again, maybe I am not surprised. Probably actually a good thing google hasn't felt compelled to touch it recently.
In unrelated news, I got a notice that they are killing google earth pro in January, so get your downloads in now before they stop sharing the packages.
It's much easier to run with something to distract you from the pain of running. Time really flies by.
Tokyo is a great pick for this kind of thing. It's big, so I usually pick a specific neighborhood (Hiroo, Shibuya...).
I just love Google Maps.
[1] https://luckysatellitepic.com
[2] https://luckysatellitepic.com/x/SATL6AB5A57891542
Taking a walk in Japan
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/thing-japan
Also, https://files.catbox.moe/ol3dtx.jpg
It really is fun just picking some random spot on the map, some random neighborhood no tourist would ever think to visit, and poking around.
I actually had a hobby of posting "virtual vacation pictures" for a while. Not any attempt at a business or going viral or anything, just literally cool things I found and took pictures of. No one cared but I thought it was cool.
Here is one of buses in Nairobi https://pixelfed.social/p/krapp/809174497538634738
And "cat island" Tajiroshima https://pixelfed.social/p/krapp/780990927466607564
Once when I pressed the random button I wound up at the LHC at CERN (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmBOew7U9rc). That was a trip!
I just wish it could actually export 3D videos in 16:9 format.