There are now geoguessr competitions, and the high level players learn to identify locations in seconds based on tiny details like utility pole designs. It’s incredible.

Here’s an example: https://youtu.be/Uvqc1_xl2h4

I started playing Geoguessr’s ranked duels a few months ago and if not for a family vacation to break me free, might have fully disappeared into the game.

Caught myself studying online guides to bollard color and shape by region, what road stripe patterns correspond with each country, the different shapes of the lettering of most major languages… etc.

It’s such a fun way to spend 15-30 minutes a day, and it’s quite easy to see improvement in your skill in a short time.

That being said, watching the pros can be a little discouraging because they’ll even have things like the ridge lines of mountain ranges memorized, it’s insane to watch.

Watching the pros made me realize they are just playing a game of memory.

How else could one play the game except using memory of places, cultures, etc? Seems like the whole thing is memory and could only ever be memory...

I guess every piece of knowledge could be considered memory.

But I can see a difference between memorising the stripes on street furniture or which countries streetview has visited for the sake of playing such games and just knowing which direction the sun is to narrow down the hemisphere or having a little understanding of how the environment varies with latitude.

I particularly don't like the Geoguessr metas that are specific to Google Street View. In particular, expert Geoguessr players know about (1) which generation of imagery Google captured in which places (the quality gets higher over time), (2) which imaging artifacts are present from panorama stitching problems in which places (like "rifts" in the sky), (3) which kinds of cars were used where and what parts of the car you can see when you look down, and (4) which countries had a specific vehicle escort the Street View car.

I think the usefulness of these things is kind of sad because they are specifically about Google Street View rather than about the outside world. I would contrast that with something like utility poles, because while that's not exactly core cultural knowledge about a society, it's actually something that you would see for yourself if you were there. And it could potentially be interesting and useful in its own right. (For example, one might consider why particular countries adopted particular utility pole styles. Maybe they were faced with local insects or weather that damaged poles of a certain style, so they had to switch to a different kind?)

I suppose this happens in every competition. Its absolutely logical to try to game a system for a win.

You can usually look around for street signs or shop fronts that include useful information (a website that ends in .nz for example).

That's still memory, knowing that .nz is associated to new zeland?

This game is mostly memory + deduction (you see a few signs which when combined, result in only one possible location)

And a very good memory at that!! I’m pretty sure jeopardy is the same way.

How do the high scoring players of jeopardy do it? Do the memorize a book of facts or something? The mind boggles.

Even if they've personally visited every country in the world, wouldn't they still be playing a game of memory too?

I like City Guesser more. No account required and you have to guess the location from a video which I find a bit easier and more enjoyable.

https://virtualvacation.us/

I could spend all day on that site! Those kinds of videos are going to be an invaluable archive 100 years from now!

I spent the following hour and a half after clicking on this on that site. Wow.

Being able to "experience" other locations, even in that shallow of a way, is really, really amazing.

thanks for sharing. that is really well done. monument guesser was great.

Trevor Rainbolt's skill at geoguessr is phenomenal: https://youtu.be/0p5Eb4OSZCs

> Vivaldi intensifies

I've always assumed these people (I see them come across my social media timelines periodically) are just trolling people because I've seen them guess where a place is based on nothing other than a patch of grass in less than 3 seconds.

I still don't see how that is even remotely possible.

Almost all of those videos are real. You can in fact quite easily identify most areas down to a few 100s of km just from the surrounding nature. It takes some practice but it is for example very easy to learn which continent the nature is in. The videos you see on social media is also of course the best case out of 100s of games.

Obviously “patch of grass” is going to be harder, but after a while you get good at noticing small details like the style of houses, the way the roads are marked, etc.

I’m by no means a pro but I went through a hyperfixation on Geoguessr YouTube videos so I started picking up the general architectural styles of Nordic houses for instance. Or the specific markings you can only find in Russia.

There’s also image artifacts which are only present in specific collection attempts. Most images from IIRC Ghana have a specific artifact and can easily narrow it down. There’s a few of these out there.

If the site is just using google api in the html source it's probably not too hard to extract the location from the javascript. A quick search shows there are browser scripts for that. But they could protect against by calling the streetview api from their server (if google allows that) and only serving the images to the user.

I play quite a bit, although I'm much more casual and generally just focus on the US. I find myself identifying areas based on foliage pretty frequently. They can be super localized and after you play a few hundred or thousand maps, you just start naturally associating different areas with different plants. I'm nowhere near good enough to guess in 3 seconds based off anything, but after a few months I find I can generally spawn, not move the camera, and correctly guess I'm in 1 of like 4 states. Depending on what's visible, I can often identify the correct state immediately, although pinpointing takes a lot more time. It's just like any game: repetition and practice makes perfect.

I spent many hours watching GeoWizard tracking down locations:

https://www.youtube.com/c/GeoWizard/playlists

A lot of fun. https://geotastic.net/ is also a good alternative.

+1

Geotastic is the best alternative I know about.