Until recently, I'd be quite casual about blogging here on Hive, y'know, like a little insight into my personal life, posting pics from my balcony when I had one and such. It was always in the back of my mind that, if anyone wanted to approach me or attack me...(who knows, maybe I get famous one day, or a disgruntled ex-girlfriend wants to letter bomb me) they'd never find me without a street name or address, and even then, good luck knocking door to door until they happen to come across me in a block of apartments that fit more people than an entire city in the UK.
That is of course, until I started following Rainbolt.
This guy is a Geoguessr. It's not a free website so I'm not privvy to the deets, but basically there's an entire community of people who challenge each other, and they are provided with a simple photo or 360 image from anywhere on the planet. The goal is to locate the exact spot within a time limit. Anywhere on earth.
Not the Eiffel Tower or Grand Canyon. These are random dirt roads in the forests of Brazil, or a puddle of water reflecting a telephone pole.
These guys are nuts.
This is not all he does. Rainbolt has literally solved crimes using blurry CCTV footage of the side of a building in some rural India. There's a video talking about how the CIA hired im for this skillset.
Many of these things he not only gets terrifyingly accurate, but fast. Some challenges he has to do based on a single FPS - or about 0.1 seconds flash of an image.
How does he do it? Well, it's not magic. It's just raw human obsession.
In the below example, he's doing some 'casual' speedruns, using an eye tracker so you can see what he looks before guessing. Could you ever guess where on the planet this was?
In about 1 second, he pinpointed this to within about 100km. (Annoyingly I closed that video and since forgot where it was. But it was like Belgium or Austria or something. Something in that entire continent)
This next one has a bit more info I could work with. I immediately thought ENGLAND!!! but the houses just looked way too nice and large, and the streets too pretty to be England, and that's where my brain gave up.
What other clues are there?
Decorations in the window? Door frame height? The car his eyes are on for 0.02 seconds before he correctly chooses Netherlands, within about a 15 minute drive out.
One more:
Very quick look at those mountains and he goes 'Looks like southern Arge... ' And gets it within about 30km.
Now up to this point, it's just impressive. Tp Rainbolt, everything is a giveaway, from the number of wires on a fence to the angle of the clouds against the sunlight, the particular subspecies of a bush and the type of cement used on a building. If you collect enough knowledge, there is no hiding.
But he can take it further. When challenged to see where somebody was based on a photo from an airplane, not only did he say where they were flying over, but also the exact seat they were sitting on, the flight number and plane model, altitude, and how many minutes into the flight the photo was taken.
In another, more heartwarming example:
Yeah, from that, he got the specific coordinates, overlaying the original photo with a modern one from exactly where they were standing:
A lot of these things arent necessarily 'speed run' material and can take endless hours slogging through various code, scraping data from maps, social media references, but he does explain here and there how he found things with very little information and it's just stunning.
The angle of particular branches on three trees gave this one away in Alaska after about 30 minutes from a blurry video of a swing:
Go check him out on Instagram or YouTube, it's just mental to see what we're all potentially capable of.
But more importantly...