Launched: GuessWhere, a free Canada-only street-view game built on Mapillary imagery

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Hi everyone,

I’m Chris, an educator in Ottawa. I’ve built a small game that I hope shows off what this community has captured across Canada: GuessWhere (https://guesswhere.ca, and in French at Où êtes-vous au Canada ? Le jeu de géolocalisation – Devine où).

How it works: you’re dropped on a real Canadian street, you look around, and you pin where you think you are. Each round is worth up to 5,000 points. It’s free, has no sign-up, and works on phones. There’s a daily challenge with the same five places for everyone, each in a different province or territory. There’s also free play by region, a harder no-moving mode, and links to challenge a friend.

Every photo in the game comes from Mapillary contributors, so crediting you was the first thing I designed:

  • After each guess, the answer screen names the photographer and links straight to that spot on Mapillary.
  • Photographer names are hidden during a round, so the credit doesn’t give the location away. They’re shown in full afterwards.
  • The site has a section explaining where the photos come from, with links to the Mapillary app and map.

For anyone curious about the API side: the game uses MapillaryJS for the viewer and the Graph API to find photos near 93 towns across the country. It first searches for photos from the last six years, then picks the best one: 360° panoramas first, then recent, sharp photos. It skips night shots, tilted photos and very blurry ones, and ranks dashcam shots lower because they often show the dashboard. Older photos are only used where nothing newer exists.

That last point is where you come in. Coverage in some places is thin or dates from 2014–2019, especially in the North and some smaller towns. New photos near the towns in the game can start appearing in rounds, so capturing your own town is a nice way to see your work played by people across Canada.

I’d love your feedback:

  1. Does the credit feel right to you as a contributor? Is there anything you’d like shown differently?
  2. Which Canadian places have great recent coverage that deserves to be in the game?
  3. Any API tips for picking good photos that I’ve missed?

To be clear, GuessWhere is an independent project and isn’t affiliated with Mapillary. It’s my way of showing off the imagery and, hopefully, encouraging more people to contribute.

Thanks for all the photos. Bonne partie !

Chris

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