Photo: Google Maps
While for many people out there Google Maps is an incredibly advanced navigation solution, the application comes with lots of other great features. And without a doubt, Street View is one of them.
With street-level imagery, Street View allows anyone out there to explore the world from the comfort of their own sofa. Just drag the little yellow man to any location on the globe and you should be able to explore the place just like you’d be there.
As it turns out, some people have turned this experience of exploring the world using Google Maps into an unusual hobby that later evolved into something totally unbelievable.
Enter Trevor Rainbolt.
The 23-year-old man from Los Angeles can look at a Street View photo for just 0.1 seconds in order to be able to tell its location. In other words, he can easily pinpoint a specific Street View image on the map faster than Google actually loads it.
Rainbolt is probably the best player of GeoGuessr – an online game where players need to tell the location of random images collected from Street View.
In a recent interview for Vice, however, Rainbolt says there’s no magic behind what he does. He believes anyone can do the same thing, as soon as they use a series of tricks that he also turns to in order to correctly provide the location of each image.
More specifically, Rainbolt is looking for things that tell apart one region from another – for example, he’s looking for road signs, the painted lines on the streets, the license plate colors, and poles to figure out where the image comes from. And he only needs 0.1 seconds for the whole thing, as you can see for yourselves in the video below.
Of course, repetition is also playing a very important role in how fast he is, as Rainbolt says he played GeoGuessr more than 10,000 times. And he still struggles in some cases, as he needs about 1 second to identify locations in Russia or other places across Europe.
As it turns out, some people have turned this experience of exploring the world using Google Maps into an unusual hobby that later evolved into something totally unbelievable.
Enter Trevor Rainbolt.
The 23-year-old man from Los Angeles can look at a Street View photo for just 0.1 seconds in order to be able to tell its location. In other words, he can easily pinpoint a specific Street View image on the map faster than Google actually loads it.
Rainbolt is probably the best player of GeoGuessr – an online game where players need to tell the location of random images collected from Street View.
In a recent interview for Vice, however, Rainbolt says there’s no magic behind what he does. He believes anyone can do the same thing, as soon as they use a series of tricks that he also turns to in order to correctly provide the location of each image.
More specifically, Rainbolt is looking for things that tell apart one region from another – for example, he’s looking for road signs, the painted lines on the streets, the license plate colors, and poles to figure out where the image comes from. And he only needs 0.1 seconds for the whole thing, as you can see for yourselves in the video below.
Of course, repetition is also playing a very important role in how fast he is, as Rainbolt says he played GeoGuessr more than 10,000 times. And he still struggles in some cases, as he needs about 1 second to identify locations in Russia or other places across Europe.
my head hurts pic.twitter.com/PHoAHkNsyS
— rainbolt (@georainbolt) August 1, 2022
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