To have a good time – and bring it to others – Trevor Reinbolt You don’t need much. You can have a computer and a good connection to navigate in Street View and in a few seconds. maybe less. Based on spending hours learning the secrets of a Google Street Map and a few other geography handbooks, Rainbolt, a 23-year-old American, is He can do something amazing With these meager resources: pinpoint any image taken from the maps.
His ability is as strange as it is extraordinary.
He can see any screenshot of Stree View for a while to confirm, quickly, almost without hesitation and Incredible level of precision, to which country or region you belong to. A remote and poorly paved road surrounded by desert hills? Australia. A dirt path surrounded by lush trees? Sri Lanka. A neighborhood with white, two-story houses and wide sidewalks under an overcast sky? United kingdom. that’s easy. thus intricately complex.
Show me a picture and I’ll tell you where you are
Rainbolt actually claims to be able to recognize the location of an image using A simple glance of 0.1 seconds, less than we ordinary humans need to maintain a vague picture of what we looked at. To delight his fans – which he has and not only a few – and to impress skeptics, the young man posts videos demonstrating his skills on his accounts. TwitterAnd the Instagram s Twitter, where he uses the username geoonrainbolt or rainbolt and has thousands of followers. Among the three, they total 86,000.
On TikTok he’s on his way to 602000 followers and huge 17 million likes. There he simply identifies himself as a “Professional Google Maps Player”. nothing else. nothing less.
Guessing where I am on Google Maps in 0.5 seconds but twice at the same time pic.twitter.com/RQUg9v6cnx
– Rainbolt (georainbolt) June 16, 2022
Guessing where I am on Google Maps in 0.1 seconds using a pixelated image pic.twitter.com/3b5uCET5b6
– Rainbolt (georainbolt) June 11, 2022
Rainbolt isn’t the only one with a passion for geography and identities on Google Maps. The game that made him famous is called GeoGuessr It had its golden age nearly a decade ago, in 2013, when he attracted the attention of a community eager to show off his skills on the street in Mountain View. Over the years, it has run out of power, but there are exceptions like that of Geostique Or Rainbolt himself allowed him to return to the spotlight in mid-2022.
The idea is very simple: your location is determined randomly at any point on the map, and with no more clues than those shown in the image, you must Get as close as possible to where you belong. In the case of Rainbolt, his talent began to materialize in the midst of a pandemic, when he was looking for ways to discover new places without leaving home. “I really wanted to experience different cultures and see the world a little bit, so I looked at GeoGuessr and the rest is history,” Related euronews.
The big question is, how does Rainbolt know that this dirt road is located exactly in northern Australia? an actWhat do you see in that normal service area, so traditional they’d pass through any secondary road in Spain, you know – surprise! – It is hidden in northern Serbia, only a few kilometers from the border with Romania?
The truth is Not everything is a hunch. Rainbolt and other great GeoGuessr players Handling specific keys that helps them orient themselves in Street View. Some of them are not even related to the place itself. For example, Google has used several generations of cameras in Street View, so based on the quality of the image, you can tell if it’s one or the other.
Something similar happens to the cars the company uses to navigate the streets or even with clearer clues, such as faded or escorted vehicles. Many homes in Germany for example, looks blurrywhich provide a valuable guide for any aspirant.
Rainbolt is a professional Google Maps player.
It can guess the location of Google Street View after seeing it for 0.1 seconds. You may have seen his ridiculous skills in his viral TikTok videos.
Here’s how he does it🧵 pic.twitter.com/9eCZL5Q8Zh
TrungTPhan June 15 2022
With this starting point, players GeoGuessr They can look at a wide variety of small details that help them determine where they are: the type of license plate, signage, which side the vehicles are on, and clearly distinguishable signs, such as phone booths or alarms. The rest… it depends on agility and good eye All.
What is clear is that to succeed in the game it is more important to pay attention to details than to travel a lot. Reinbolt himself admits it He never left America.
“Thinker. Professional twitter fanatic. Certified introvert. Troublemaker. Unapologetic zombie maven.”