It’s said that there is beauty in the world around us: all we need is but to open our eyes and see it. Google is interested in helping us see that world with greater detail and clarify than ever before thanks to apps like Maps and Earth. Thanks to some creative use of coloring, Sean Utter has now created an entirely new vision of the world we live in.
The premise is quite simple: by taking existing images from Google Maps and playing with the colors and saturation, Utter has created something that is part art and part quiz (namely in trying to guess where some of the images depict).
By taking a stroll over to Utter’s website, you can find a seemingly endless streaming series of pictures, which he explains as follows: The site “generates a random map every 4 seconds. Each element of the map is a random color and is randomly turned on or off. The geographic location is randomly chosen from 26 predetermined cities and the zoom level is random.”
Perhaps even better, the project seems to be fully sanctioned by Google, as the Android creator has even taken to Twitter to announce the news:
Around the world in crazy color schemes—this #MapsHack takes you on an eye-popping tour. http://t.co/1AmZraOm8x pic.twitter.com/WJ8K6Enk0j
— Google Maps (@googlemaps) August 28, 2015
Take a look at some of the randomly generated pics we witnessed:
As cool as this is, we can’t help but lament the timing; had this project been posted just a few months earlier, perhaps there would have been some retro game action to hunt for, or at the very least, some anti-Apple propaganda.