Where am I? Gaming whizzes put geography on the map
The world's best gamers who can identify a location anywhere in the world after seeing an image in less than a second face off Saturday in a world championship in Stockholm. A picture of a sunny paved road appears on a computer screen, bordered by trees and bushes. A red dirt road crosses the paved road, in what appears to be a tropical landscape. "We're going to be in Indonesia because of the sticker on this pole," Trevor Rainbolt of the United States tells AFP.
He clicks on the map and selects what appears to be a random location in Indonesia.
Bingo -- he's just 88 kilometres (55 miles) from the actual spot.
Rainbolt, a fast-talking computer geek, is one of the biggest stars in the GeoGuessr game community for his uncanny ability to determine the location of a Google Maps picture in a tenth of a second -- less than the blink of an eye.
An AFP reporter watching him play is barely able to see the image in that amount of time, much less guess the country, city or village.
"It requires a lot of work and research," Rainbolt admits.
"During the pandemic I played around 18 hours a day."
Created by the Swedish trio Anton Wallen, Daniel Antell and Erland Ranvinge, Geoguessr was born on May 10, 2013 when it was published on a popular platform for coders.
The idea is simple: a player is dropped somewhere in the world on Google Maps' Street View and has to guess where he is.
He puts his cursor on the world map and clicks on the location he thinks is correct. The closer the player is to the real spot, the more points he gets.
"My friend Anton was playing around with the Application Programming Interface (API) that Google released publicly, so he made a small game and put it on Reddit," Antell told AFP.
"Then it went viral."
Poles and plants
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