I also like to watch those videos of people just going out for walks in their town but I like being able to choose where to go in streetview.
With how expensive it is to actually go to other countries this is my best bet for cultural enrichment. I’ve done cities in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Oceania.
And once in a while I get to see something neat that I wouldn’t’ve seen on youtube or actually going there. Such as the time I went to a random shopping plaza in miami and turned down an alley to find that alley hadn’t been recorded since 2008 so I got to see a few pictures of that shopping center under construction.
The hardest part of this is doing my best to ignore the “God I wish I lived there” thoughts.
I’m gonna go explore Bhutan now.
There’s a VR app called Wander that is specifically designed for this. I’ve been to the pyramids, Machu Picchu, random slums in Mexico, China… It’s pretty neat. Can also view historical photos in certain places.
This might be the first time since Half-Life Alyx that something made me actually wish I had a VR headset.
How is a fish replying to me right now, am I tripping?
It’s a little known fact that South African deep sea caves have had fiber internet piped in since 2012!
Damnit! Kentucky sucks. We just got fiber last year :-[
I love Wander, visit lots of places. I love visiting my childhood city, and previewing places I’m going to vacation/visit/park, and so many great tourist places. Check out Chichen Itza!
Hell, how have I never thought of that? I’ll give it a gander!
Might I recommend the train simulator OpenBVE to you? The fascinating part (for me) is that train fans have contributed content to it from all over the world. I love it. Take a commuter train from the outskirts to the center of Tokyo, complete with all sounds. Drive an ancient cogwheel railway in the Italian alps. Or a tram in Copenhagen, or the historical Orient Express, etc. etc.
so i’m not the only one… whew.
That’s one of the reasons, why I like to play Geoguesssr
I’m better at Timeguessr than at Geoguessr, for some reason.
Yeah, Geoguesssr has some insane meta like “a google car with this color can only be found in $area” or “the antenna of the google car indicates that…”. I think that might be harder on timeguessr.
I’m not completely immune to picking such things up (e.g. the famous “Ghana Tape”), but I try to avoid learning them explicitly - I want to focus on the look, language and landscape of a country and such.
Yeah, using the Google car to determine what country you’re in, feels like cheating and should only be used by speed runners. It’s more fun to determine it from the landscape and signs. It should after all be a game.
I’ve done this too! My ancestry is from Italy, but I’ve never been and am not really a fan of travel nor do I have the excess funds to toss on trips so I used google maps street view to “walk around” some places in Italy lol I “visited” a few other places like Japan too, it’s a very cool feature to be honest.
I did this a ton during covid
I got to know my hometown much better! As far as I could go on a normal public transport ticket. Surprisingly far. Forests, lakes, parkland…
Google Earth is great for that.
It is more fun to follow legitimate mining prospectors, learn the actual gritty geology of an area, and both mines and urban explorers in abandoned places that tell the stories behind each location while presenting what they see free from hype, emotions, or nonsense.
Those were major binges for me during the lows of my first few years of disability. I can’t travel any more, or do a great many things. It made me really shift how I view travel anyways. I’m usually an off-the-beaten-path type person, but even with that mindset, I don’t know all the local tourist stuff in my region either. Travel is often so superficial and consumer oriented no matter how obscure one tries to plan. A lot of the motivation amounts to nothing more than abstract flag planting.
However, one can scratch the itch to digitally explore some cave of wonders and imagine stumbling upon a collapsed wall of riches around the next bend, or simply marvel at the engineering and what life was like across the last centuries or even millennia in long abandoned mines.
If you ever stared at rock cuts on the side of a highway and wondered of deep time, explore with someone like Nick Zentner and discover the geology of the north western United States to decide if you are into edgy science of Baja-BC or of the Rocky Mountains old guard.
Anyways, I moved on to other stuff mostly since then. I will still watch Nick when he posts his polished auditorium talks.
This is just one way to be a cheap miser, or cope with circumstances - whatever they may be, or maybe break the money burner cycle.
That does sound cool.
