FAMILY-” It is the only picture I have of my mother. Is it possible to know where it was taken? It would be great to know more about her. Within minutes, Trevor Rainbolt found the exact location: Lake Ritsa, Georgia. The 24-year-old American masters Google Maps like no one else. And as you can see in the video above, he puts his talent at the service of his subscribers.
Trevor has continued training GeoGuessr, an online video game launched in 2013 by the Swede Anton Wallén. In it, the player is transported to a random location on Google Street View and then has to guess where they are. And Trevor Rainbolt is probably one of the best players in the world.
According to him, the secret is in the details. For example, the double yellow lines at the edges of the roads are typical of Great Britain or Singapore, and the small blue labels stuck to the electric poles indicate a French landscape. He also keeps an eye out for the distinctive signs of each language or even the color of the vehicle’s number plates.
Find family photos
Last October, Trevor received a message from a subscriber who said he needed help tracking the location of a video shot 13 years ago in Japan where he and his wife got engaged. Amused by this challenge, the American begins research and uncovers the desired location. That’s when he starts asking his subscribers if they want to find places that have sentimental value to them and the inquiries that pour in.
One of them asked him to find out where this picture of his late father was taken because he wanted his ashes to be scattered there. The answer ? In the small Canadian town of Canmore. And as Trevor points out in the comments, it only took him ten minutes.
If he can get his hands on an exact location in a few minutes, the young man sometimes has to spend days scouring Google Maps. ” And some requests are simply impossible because there is too little to identifyhe confided Insider. Like a black and white photo with only a brick wall for reference. »
Despite his impressive knowledge of geography, the young man from Arkansas, who now lives in Los Angeles, had never left North America. ” This game gave me the freedom to explore the corners of the world and the ambition to do it for real. I want to go to Laos, Iceland… Places I hadn’t heard of before “, he explains to Télérama. Since then, he has sold everything he owned and decided to live in a different country every month. First on the list: Germany.
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