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).

I watch a lot of videos of people just exploring Tokyo and other cities on foot. Good stuff.

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.

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.

I used to do this with videos on DeoVR - they had a couple of long drive channels (usually across Korea) or biking in Japan - while on my exercise bike. After their app stopped working for me I looked for similar videos on Youtube.

I found a lot but unfortunately the VR ones tend to be badly compressed. There are a lot of 8K HD walking/driving videos but none of them are VR.

It is objectively better than staring at my back wall, though.

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.

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. ;)

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.

If we're thinking of the same angle, is it from this channel? https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbTLJi8lXWIt_d1AtRv4Nmw

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...

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

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.

I really like this setup. Coukd you share a bit about the hardware and software in case we want to replicate? Thanks for sharing!

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

There are some channels on Youtube where someone walks through neighborhoods in Tokyo

Shout out to Rambalac whose videos I enjoy a lot for this. No words, no music, just walking. An occasional vending machine stop.

I love tokyo, but tbh, I don't think it's particularly clean? At least when I went there was a fair bit of rubbish around the place; certainly not as much as you'd find in most of Europe but definitely far far more than you'd expect given the cities reputation. I find most of Australia ~as clean.

Were you staying in Shinjuku or Shibuya? Those areas can get particularly dirty in recent years. I think overall Tokyo is still pretty clean in comparison from other places I've lived or traveled though.

https://youtube.com/@tokyolens

If you think you know Tokyo, think again! This guy really got me into a rabbit hole of all these cool places and spots all around Tokyo and the surrounding areas.

He left his corporate job in the US to train to become a pilot in Japan and make YouTube on the side, exploring the beautiful country :)

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.

The car spotted is just one example. Here's another well preserved over the time: https://maps.app.goo.gl/64iSqCS7d2DLWpt86

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...).

I love doing this, in every city, even without Google Maps!

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.

TIL that Bing has maps and even street view. Had never heard of it.

A forgotten classic video depicts a similar story: https://youtu.be/fPgV6-gnQaE

My grandfather passed away a few years ago. Google caught him raking leaves in the front yard a year prior. It’s nice to visit him once in a while.

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

PlaneSpotting in Google Maps had been my favorite for many years. Somehow, I lost that interest now.

https://discussions.flightaware.com/t/aircraft-in-flight-in-...

Buy a plane ticket and go. I once walked 10 miles in Tokyo and never got bored.

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.

[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

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

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. This new age Instagram drama: flash talk for goddesses and sunsets.

I guess it works! But it's gross. lol.

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. This new age Instagram drama: flash talk for goddesses and sunsets.

I was going to say it didn't seem like AI to me, but sure enough pangram flagged it as AI. I guess I got used to all the claude-isms that I was only looking for that and not anything else.

Immediate tell: Same street. Same place. 2009.

I used AI for only grammar correction since English is not my first language; other than that, my ideas, my thinking, and my way of writing are mine.

You've erased your own voice and evidence of thinking and writing.

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.

I think a lot of that is more "Tokyo" than "Japan" though. My general experience outside of the metropoolis (and even within Tokyo proper, there are good chunks that are properly dead beyond a certain time) is that the evenings are nice and dark.

This isn't even really limited to the countryside, plenty of decently large cities will have most all of their evening activity be focused on a handful of streets.

This is fine, of course! I do think a lot about how much of the image of Japan is mostly the image of Tokyo itself. Not the largest city in the world anymore but quite close.

Tokyo is def very cool though. Huge city that you can actually move around in easily enough means that no matter how microscopic of a subculture you belong to there'll be _some_ people out there in the same category. And very fun to walk around in. Really a great joy to just be able to walk in the middle of a street and not really worry about cars.

True although I think there’s too much of a correction whenever people bring up Tokyo vs Japan.

I’m grateful to live in Tokyo but if I didn’t live in Tokyo I wouldn’t live in Japan. I’m definitely open to a vacation home in the countryside.

I could see myself living in NYC (Manhattan specifically) but wouldn’t want to live anywhere else in the US. Tokyo is big enough that you rarely have to leave and see the rest of the country. I don’t think we have to judge countries by their countrysides.

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.

I do this often. Every time I hear about a city or place in a video, book, or any other media, I immediately pause it and google map the location and if they have a street view I “walk” the streets. Probably a waste of time, but it helps me contextualize the place and people living there.

Google Street View is one of the most incredible engineering work produced by humans, it's just incredible.

I have also spent an incredible amount of time looking at slowly moving Street View footage, but it was through https://neal.fun/internet-roadtrip/ - a "game" where strangers collectively vote to move around Street View coverage at slightly faster than walking pace.

It was a great community, and good fun to see so much of North America that I would never visit. It's still going, but I don't visit as much (it used to be basically permanent second/third monitor content while I wrote my thesis). A cool opportunity for programming too: I made a bunch of mods for the game (https://greasyfork.org/en/users/1473129-jdranczewski) and a basic ambient viewer where you can just watch the Street View go by (https://jdranczewski.dev/irt/viewer.html).

Google Street View used to be a time capsule for Germany until a few years ago: they started gathering data around 2007-2008, then there was huge public backlash (something about invasion of privacy - sure, they only photograph from public streets, but the cameras are placed much higher than an average person walking or driving, so could "look" over fences that would otherwise be too high etc.), so the government decided that anyone living in a building could request their whole building to be blurred in StreetView (with an exception for storefronts IIRC). So Google kinda just lost interest (or decided to wait for the negative sentiment to die down), and for the few larger cities that were already captured, you could always take a look at how a street used to look back in 2008.