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.<p>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.<p>I run <a href="http://www.mapcrunch.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.mapcrunch.com</a> 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.<p>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.
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.<p>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...<p>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.<p>Anyways, great work!<p>[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 <i>lot</i> more people.]
I would love to know how much Google spends on StreetView.<p>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."
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.
I'm getting lots of really pretty scenery in Bulgaria. So much that it's making me think about moving. I love this!<p>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. <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03s6mf0" rel="nofollow">http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03s6mf0</a>
I might have found the most English looking location (also very beautiful)<p><a href="http://randomstreetview.com/#vmyhk_-2h1og_4l_a_-g" rel="nofollow">http://randomstreetview.com/#vmyhk_-2h1og_4l_a_-g</a>
Neat! There was a similar project here a few years ago: <a href="http://www.mapcrunch.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mapcrunch.com/</a> comments: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3215460" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3215460</a>
I've been enjoying a similar site, <a href="http://www.mapcrunch.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mapcrunch.com/</a>, 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.<p><a href="http://randomstreetview.com/#xqgi5_5um0z_64_d_-7" rel="nofollow">http://randomstreetview.com/#xqgi5_5um0z_64_d_-7</a>
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.<p>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.
Check out this sweet dragon.<p><a href="http://randomstreetview.com/#wrua5_dhcmy_2m_a_-3" rel="nofollow">http://randomstreetview.com/#wrua5_dhcmy_2m_a_-3</a><p>Seriously, this is a fantastic thing you've made. I'm enjoying it immediately.
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<p>...Of course, this was easier before google indexed so much countryside....
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.
<a href="http://dreamlands-virtual-tour.blogspot.fr/" rel="nofollow">http://dreamlands-virtual-tour.blogspot.fr/</a>
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).
A non-random Street View project that has some very interesting images.<p><a href="http://9-eyes.com/" rel="nofollow">http://9-eyes.com/</a>
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. <a href="http://www.mapillary.com/map/im/jvEX_s9fM7SwTDoMdeYDOw" rel="nofollow">http://www.mapillary.com/map/im/jvEX_s9fM7SwTDoMdeYDOw</a> - 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.<p>Walk this one back down the street, you can see the pedestrians watching.<p><a href="http://randomstreetview.com/#-6p0t9_-nfxtl_qa_a_-2" rel="nofollow">http://randomstreetview.com/#-6p0t9_-nfxtl_qa_a_-2</a>
Interesting! A few things:<p>- 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.)
I built something similar for university. Though it uses location from Instagram, the photo, and description text to provide some context.
<a href="http://sm.rutgers.edu/thebeat/" rel="nofollow">http://sm.rutgers.edu/thebeat/</a>
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 <i>sweet</i> 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.
You can use this to answer questions like below:<p>1. How much of the roads in the world passes through dessert?<p>2. What is the chance that you would see a person if you had been driving all over?<p>3. How much of the streets are in urban areas?<p>And so on...<p>All you need to do is just press next few times and count!
This was on mobile as a game a while ago
<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/map-mayhem/id608008620?mt=8" rel="nofollow">https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/map-mayhem/id608008620?mt=8</a>
I didn't even know that Google had street view cars in rural Africa! <a href="http://randomstreetview.com/#-en562_fdoqw_-2i_a_-7" rel="nofollow">http://randomstreetview.com/#-en562_fdoqw_-2i_a_-7</a>
Wow, it only took me two clicks to get a glitched out shot : <a href="http://randomstreetview.com/#p6d4o_-4vsu8_93_a_4" rel="nofollow">http://randomstreetview.com/#p6d4o_-4vsu8_93_a_4</a>
Well, is really does what it says, that _was_ random:
<a href="http://randomstreetview.com/#phyzb_dnid7_-d_r_-5" rel="nofollow">http://randomstreetview.com/#phyzb_dnid7_-d_r_-5</a>
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.
This site does the same thing and has been around atleast a few years: <a href="http://www.globegenie.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.globegenie.com/</a>
At first I thought, what is the point?<p>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.<p>This is really cool.
My colleague just showed me <a href="http://geoguessr.com/" rel="nofollow">http://geoguessr.com/</a>, which is a pretty fun twist on the same concept.
I 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.
Reminds me of the fantastic game based around random street view: <a href="http://geoguessr.com/" rel="nofollow">http://geoguessr.com/</a>
This was pretty cool<p><a href="http://randomstreetview.com/#m19t2_-1xxgr6_-o_a_-7" rel="nofollow">http://randomstreetview.com/#m19t2_-1xxgr6_-o_a_-7</a>
reminds me of a manager i worked for in 2000. he wrote a random lat/lang algo and actually used it for his vacation trips.<p><a href="http://www.abulsme.com/trip/spottool.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.abulsme.com/trip/spottool.html</a><p>this is a clear upgrade :)
How 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:<p><pre><code> To use street view, you need Adobe Flash Player version 10 or newer.
Get the latest Flash Player.</code></pre>
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.