geoguessr

[agentsteel53]

cute flash game someone shared with me to day.  I posted this under "general highway talk" because, in my opinion, the best way to do well at this is to look at transportation cues like which side of the road the cars are on, type of striping and signage, etc.

http://www.geoguessr.com/

best I've done is 3170 points, for guessing within 0.13km.

(I must note that it has an unusual affinity for Australia... and, mercifully, has not yet dumped me into the middle of the Pacific.)

[andrewkbrown]

I got 3172 points for being within 0.012km in Key West. But is was a gimme, as the street view was in front of the Weston Hotel sign in Key West.

I got 12710 points total for the round, my best, since all 5 were either Key West area or relatively easy guesses of Australia.

[agentsteel53]

wow.  0.012 beats my 0.027 in New Zealand (also 3172 points).  I was two steps away from an "End 94" sign assembly, so I quickly found that... then I clicked on where I had moved to, while I believe the software judges where you started from.  I think I was at most 1-2 meters away from identifying the destination.

I wish the scoring system were reciprocal instead of linear.  I should get about a trillion points for being that close!  a combination of linear and reciprocal, and perhaps a bonus for identifying the correct country.

[agentsteel53]

relatively easy guesses of Australia.

I've never been able to get within 200km on my guesses of "random outback segment of National Highway 1".

[CNGL-Leudimin]

I got 3172 points for being within 0.012km in Key West. But is was a gimme, as the street view was in front of the Weston Hotel sign in Key West.

I got 12710 points total for the round, my best, since all 5 were either Key West area or relatively easy guesses of Australia.

I've got 0.012 km in FL as well. I always look to signs where possible.

[wphiii]

Literally logged on just to post this, but agentsteel beat me to it. My high for a full game is 14,300 by "cheating" (looking up locations based on clues) and 10,000 some without any help at all. Best for an individual scene was .005 km away at the ferry terminal in Cozumel. There is a really distinct sculpture there that the thing starts you right in front of, so it was easy to pinpoint it almost exactly.

[corco]

YES! I've been trying to drag my mouse around to random spots on street view with my eyes closed and then not look up to play this exact same game, but it doesn't work too well. This is amazing.

[pianocello]

My closest was .004 km off of this intersection in Ketchikan. I got more points (6479) with that one picture than in some whole rounds I played earlier.

[hobsini2]

I got a total of 7429 pts. I had 3 of the 5 within 100 miles.

[CNGL-Leudimin]

^^ Miles? The game is in that unknown-in-the-US unit that is the kilometer .

My closest was .004 km off of this intersection in Ketchikan. I got more points (6479) with that one picture than in some whole rounds I played earlier.

Just got 0.001 km off that same intersection. Only three feet.

BTW, I always mess up Australia and South Africa .

[J N Winkler]

I got 23481 points total (five rounds), over 7000 of which came from cheating on a really easy one--the center of the signalized intersection of 53 Avenue (Hwy. 2) and 48 Street (Hwy. 749) at a location which had to be somewhere in urban Canada because of the use of a single yellow line as a center stripe.  I "missed" that by precisely 0 km.

My five were:

*  Someplace in the Pacific (I thought Japan on the basis of a blue pedestrian crossing sign and what appeared to be kanji on a bus stop sign, but it turned out to be a Pacific island under Japanese control but quite far away from the Japanese home islands--Iwo Jima?)

*  Sportsman's Paradise just off La. 56 near Chauville (that one was really, really easy to cheat)

*  Someplace in Norway, just west of Bergen (I knew it was Norway from a sign spotted in the distance; zooming in on it and then doing a Google Maps search gave me the rest)

*  Someplace in non-coastal Australia (I guessed western NSW, but it turned out to be eastern WA)

*  The Canadian location described above (it turned out to be in High Prairie, Alberta)

This game is much easier than a classic SABRE WAI since you are given the ability to navigate to signs to read them.  Essentially, anyone who is familiar with sign design practices, striping colors, and typical pavement cross-sections in a wide range of countries can do very well.  As soon as I finished my five rounds, the screen cleared for the next set of five, and I can tell just by looking that the first round is somewhere in Mexico (cunetas, rural setting, single yellow center stripe).

[mukade]

*  Someplace in the Pacific (I thought Japan on the basis of a blue pedestrian crossing sign and what appeared to be kanji on a bus stop sign, but it turned out to be a Pacific island under Japanese control but quite far away from the Japanese home islands--Iwo Jima?)

Probably Chichi-jima. That is the only island with anything resembling a town in the Ogasawara (Bonin) Islands. AFAIK, Iwo-jima has no permanent population. Maybe just a military facility.

[algorerhythms]

I've been playing this game a lot the past couple days, and just managed to score 21577 though sheer luck. The sites it gave me were:

* An intersection in Fort Lauderdale where you could clearly see the street names (it was SR A1A and some street whose name I've forgotten)
* A street in Brazil where there was a business with a large sign displaying its address
* A street corner in Seoul
* A street in northern Mexico (this one I missed by the most; I knew it was in Mexico but I didn't know where so I guessed Mexico City).
* A cemetery in Virginia (I randomly guessed Ohio based on the vegetation and the relatively flat terrain).

[huskeroadgeek]

YES! I've been trying to drag my mouse around to random spots on street view with my eyes closed and then not look up to play this exact same game, but it doesn't work too well. This is amazing.

I've tried this before too, but I've found it's too difficult to keep from looking at the location indicator.

I just did this and had some interesting results. 2 of them I got the country right(Canada and Brazil), but was pretty far away from the actual location. 1 of them I was far away from the actual location(it was Brazil-I picked Hawaii because of the tropical location and mountains and there were no business or road signs nearby to indicate the country). My last one was a really strange result-it appeared to be inside a restaurant somewhere, there was no ability to move-just pan around and the only indication of its location was signage in English, but it gave its location as somewhere in the Caribbean near Cuba. Not sure what that one was, unless it was inside a cruise ship.
1 of them though I was really close to and was something of a lucky guess. It put me on a rural road somewhere. The one obvious clue was an American flag visible in the front yard of a home. Other than that, the only signs visible nearby were a No Passing Zone sign and a School Bus Stop Ahead sign. The only other clue was the terrain-a mostly flat, fairly wooded area. For some reason, it seemed like Minnesota-maybe the central or northern part of the state. I picked an area west of Brainerd. It turns out it was north of Brainerd-I was a mere 39 km away from the actual location.

[Kniwt]

Desperately addictive, and I totally won a round when I "randomly" was given the north vista point of the Golden Gate Bridge. Which begs the question: Are the "random" spots pre-defined by the author ... and, if so, how big is the database? It seems highly, highly unlikely that I'd get such a perfect spot completely at random.

[algorerhythms]

The spots are chosen by the author. In fact, there are quite a few spots that correspond to famous locations where the initial camera position is away from the famous location so you won't notice it at first, like with the Golden Gate Bridge one (it's given that one to me as well). After a while the locations start repeating.

[J N Winkler]

I imagine having a large database of locations is one way of avoiding writing an AMF deserializer, which is what the author would need for genuinely random selection of locations that are on a road and have StreetView imagery.

[agentsteel53]

they must have recalibrated the scoring within the last few days.

You missed with 0.029 km which gave 6477 points.

[english si]

I got 18712 points with my first set of five - just pivoting. Landed on a new bridge in Ireland (which was easy to work out), and on I-70 next to a mileage sign, which gave me two close ones. There was one that looked poor (but not too poor) and European, so I put the spot in the middle of Romania and was 100km off. Had a Russian one and a Japanese one that I was off by over 1000km, so yes, they do seem to have changed the scoring.

[Roadsguy]

I got 29422 points. I wish you could narrow it down to specifically do only random points in your country, state, or whatever you pick.

[US12]

got 6,356 points on being 1.14 km off from the Prudhoe bay hotel in Prudhoe Bay Alaska

[Duke87]

The spots are chosen by the author. In fact, there are quite a few spots that correspond to famous locations where the initial camera position is away from the famous location so you won't notice it at first, like with the Golden Gate Bridge one (it's given that one to me as well). After a while the locations start repeating.

Knowing that there is a set list of predetermined locations somehow makes it seem less fun.

[Dougtone]

I played a couple of rounds, found out that some of my visual clues were based on what languages that signage, ads or passing vehicles had.  On one of my questions, a Pemex station was a dead giveaway that I had to guess somewhere in Mexico.

[KEK Inc.]

I think 6500 is the highest.  I've tried 3 games, and I got some urban North American ones I was able to nail to around 6450.  I seem to be averaging 12,000-14,000. 

Worst score was 86.  It was someone's backyard in Germany.

[dfilpus]

I had two where I could locate the spot exactly. With the accuracy of dropping the pin, I got scores of the high 6400's. One was where I-84 crosses the ID/UT state line. The other was in front of the Marine Museum in Seward AK.