Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
City Guesser – GeoGuessr but with video (virtualvacation.us)
114 points by jurnip 1971 days ago
20 comments

The first "France" video I got was from Paris at the Arc de Triomphe, which I duly tagged exactly on the map, only to be told I was one mile out (the map's marker was near the Louvre). Doesn't inspire 100% confidence.

Also, when I choose some geographically constrained area to guess in, like Europe or France, it would be nice if the guessing map didn't start out centered on the USA...

Maybe the total duration of the video walked to that area? But yeah, the default centring of the map is really annoying.
Respectfully, I don't think the point is to be 100% accurate :) I'm having fun just immersing myself in other places
Are you sure it wasn't Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel? It is near Louvre and looks similar.
Fair point, but no. Not that I wasn't sure before, but I found the video again (I see no way to get a YouTube link, which is a pity), and it's definitely "the one" at Place de l'Étoile. And for whatever it's worth, the game's marker isn't at the Carrousel either (I didn't check it in that much detail before), but at the start of Champs-Elysées near Concorde.
I feel like I should mention that I didn't make this and don't know the creator. I recently stumbled across the site, enjoyed playing the game (especially couch co-op style) and felt it was worth sharing here.

You can contribute to the project by submitting your own videos (details: https://virtualvacation.us/our-mission).

The creator also has a donation page set up here: https://ko-fi.com/cityguesser

Very cool sensation of literally walking through all these places! I have never been to India, but was mesmerized taking an HD tour through an open street market.

The map/guessing UI is a bit clunky, since the map always starts centered on USA, so if you're in a country-specific mode, you always have to click and drag a bunch, and then after you click the city, you have to click again the "Guess" button.

England "Includes Scotland and Wales" - that's called Great Britain. Does it keep score? I can't see my history or how I've been doing.

Beautiful videos, though (except the head bobbing).

Also if I've picked a country, start the map centred on that country.

This was oddly mesmerizing. Great job!

I wish it would break up into sets of 5 and give you a score for your "round" based on how close your guesses were.

Fun! Nice work. I did the US one until I got a repeat. Transit and license plates were the best context clues. Weather, foliage, and architecture helped a bit, as did some business names.
I saw license plates but they were too far away for the resolution of the video. I got the exact city from some other clues.
Really nice! But since it uses an underlying Youtube video, when I turned the volume up, it showed me the volume overlay with the video title that was playing. Most videos were labeled "<city name> walking tour" or something like this; so if you're willing to cheat, it can be fairly easy :)
Very cool

Brazil seemed to only have 2-3 videos which are very easy to guess. I'd love to have a lot more to work with.

This might be less interesting, but I'd be really interested in a people version. I think I'm good at knowing someone's nationality by looking at their facial features and manner of dress.

I really love this, I enjoy geoguessr a lot but hate the clunky navigating. This feels much more atmospheric
geoguessr used to be really fun. it was a cool thing to do over social gatherings. theyve put so many gateways and shitty ui on it since its a huge pain to use now. just my opinion.
If Hollywood has taught me anything, it's that the answer is always Vancouver.
Isn't it amazing that every alien planet in the universe looks like Canada? As long as they also have poutine, beam me up!
Let's not forget all the planets that look like the Vasquez Rocks
Awesome! It seems I really suck at the NW united states but I'm getting to within a few miles of locations in the southern and eastern halves of the US. I would love to know where they are sourcing their videos from.
Cool, but how do I disable the head bobbing? (seriously.)
The underlying data source is just a YouTube video, so to remove head bobbing, you'd have to apply visual processing algorithms for that (that boil down to computing the most likely global pixel shift frame-by-frame, and shifting the whole video horizontally&vertically to compensate).
They're just Youtube videos so it's going to depend on how it was recorded. There's video reprocessing that could fix that but it's a lot to ask for a little game site to reprocess all the videos.
cl_bob 0 (less serious)
sv_cheats 1; noclip
As the domain implies, it’s like virtual vacation. A score board would be nice. Centering of the map should be near the area chosen.
Maybe a way to keep track of your guesses would make it more fun. You could also build a leaderboard on the best guessers overall.
Ironically, this is probably cheaper to run than GeoGuessr because it doesn't use Google Street View queries.
It's great but with the streaks mode for countries it seems over half of them are in the usa
I'm missing a way to stop the video or even move back/forward in the video. Fun though
Sent the link to a streamer I watch who likes to play GeoGuesser. She’s having fun so far :)
This is easily the most fun thing I've done in months.
This is great fun.

Thanks!