My weird new hobby: Wandering around Tokyo on Google Maps
ahmedhossamdev.com144 points by ahmedhossamdev 2 days ago
144 points by ahmedhossamdev 2 days ago
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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!
A forgotten classic video depicts a similar story: https://youtu.be/fPgV6-gnQaE
I have a picture of my car in street view photo made by Bing. Sold the car long ago, nice keepsake.
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. ;)
> 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.
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.
Lee Chapman does actual photo-walking tours of Tokyo and Osaka... sign ups are going on right now!
https://leechapman.photos/tokyo-photowalk-tours
http://edition.cnn.com/videos/travel/2016/08/11/tokyo-pov-le...
There’s a show on Japanese television about touring Japan on bicycle which may or may not appeal to you https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/5115002/
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.
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
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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...
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 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.
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-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Buy a plane ticket and go. I once walked 10 miles in Tokyo and never got bored.
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.
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
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.
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 recommend map-making-app for wandering around (https://map-making.app/) which is what all serious geoguessr players use.
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 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.
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.
I do the same except with really bad countries as a reminder to myself of how much worse things could be.
Me too! :)
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
It was the white car in the original link that was the point of focus, quite rare.
I call this a Street viewcation https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Street+View
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.
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
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
I watch a lot of videos of people just exploring Tokyo and other cities on foot. Good stuff.
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.
There are tons of videos of people walking around Japan. I usually watch them while working out.
I sometimes watch those walking videos after visiting the city. Its whole different feeling than watching random video.
I've been watching lot of brazil vidoes. Man that country is not very good looking but its fascinating to watch.
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...
Haha, that’s actually a really cool hobby and the 350Z story makes it even more interesting
I love doing this, in every city, even without Google Maps!
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