900 people are driving at the same time and democratically a virtual car on Google Street view

Every time you connect to Roadtrip Internet You will be at a different point from the United States. At the time of writing these lines, specifically, I am in Freeport, a town located in Cumberland County, Maine. Internet Roadtrip is a collective experience that uses the exhaustive map of Google Street View to organize an online experience of collective discovery. Instant in instantaneous.

How Internet Roadtrip works. Very simple: you just have to connect to The game websiteand we will meet the controls of a vehicle. We and the rest of the people who are connected at that time, normally between 700 and 900 co-conductors. Every nine seconds, the web asks that it be voted in one of the possible addresses, and the one that has the most votes is the one followed. And so on to infinity. At this time the thing is not exciting, because the Maine road It seems never to end and can only be circulated in one direction, but the thing improves: cities, crossings of roads and depopulated areas are some of the key moments of the trip.

Gagá Radio Until touching the horn or the station that is heard in the car (although the unwritten rule, which is discovered after chatting for a while with the rest of the travelers, is that they do not skip stations) are actions subjected to vote. The stations are real and come from authentic stations that broadcast from sites near the places through which the car passes: thus attentive to irrelevant detail is this trip through deep America, and it is that placidity and democracy of decisions that this website has turned into the relaxing internal experiment par excellence of the moment.

Internet belongs to everyone. The trip does not have been going too long: it left last Tuesday from Boston, and for the moment the car has failed to leave the next state. Its developer, Neal Agarwal, recognizes in 404 average that its inspiration was another recent and counterintuitive collective experiment: ‘Twitch plays pokémon ‘an experiment that has already turned a decade And in which visitors to the game’s Twitch channel tried, based on continuous voting, advance in a game of ‘Pokémon’. The result was much more erratic and demential than this internet Roadtrip, where Google brands are followed, that is, there is no way to end upside down in the gutter.

Some precedent. It is not the first time that the Internet embarks on such a trip: in 2018, the writer and photographer Matthew Musprat toured the United States using only Street View, side by side and crossing sixteen states … while physically lived in Rwanda. Before him, like They counted in Wired When detailing Muspratt’s feat, a couple of people traveled from San Francisco to New York in ninety hours, at clicking, as quickly as they could and carefully plan the trip. Muspratt’s trip had some contemplative, stopping to observe the landscapes whenever he wanted.

More and more sophisticated. Pandemia promoted this type of virtual trips in its day out of necessitybut initiatives like Internet Roadtrip are made for pure pleasure. Technology also provides new ways to face it. For example, You can travel in time Until eighty years in the past with the historic images taken by Google. Or Google’s AI can be used to generate routes from photos Taken on a trip. Although the authentic dream of Agarwal is that these collaborative trips can really be made, with an autonomous car controlled remotely. For that. But maybe not too much.

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