Explore Google Street View’s Oddities That Actually Came From This Planet

Who says ordinary life is just, well, ordinary? The most unexpected gems might reside in your own neighborhood, just waiting for the world to discover.

Google Street View started out as a tool to help users picture specific areas in maps as though they were walking through them. To enable these visualizations, Google sends special cameras out on drives, bike rides, and boat trips around the world to take photos of their surroundings and piece the resulting imagery into explorable maps.

A side effect of this ambitious effort comes to the amusement of observers, who often stumble upon awkward moments and bizarre locations. Among them is an Ontario man forever memorialized as ‘Tripod Man’. The unfortunate character was rummaging through his car one day when a Google camera-equipped vehicle zipped by and captured a series of images that, when rendered, turned him into a three-legged man.

Developer Neal Agarwal has preserved the memory of ‘Tripod Man’, and many others, on a fantastic new site called Wonders of Street View. Think of it as a Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, but one birthed from your backyard.

The functionality of Wonders of Street View is simple. It shows a randomized Google Street View shot each time you land on the homepage, and a quick click of a button transports you to the next weird corner of the world. Some of the snapshots showcase once-in-a-lifetime moments, while others capture architectural oddities you can still visit today.

Wonders of Street View is pretty new, but it already houses about 300 unusual sights for wanderlusters and humor-seekers alike, CNET reports. Agarwal hopes to keep growing the collection with the help of the community.

Metaverse, who? Outer space, where? Earth can be just as surreal and wonderful.

[via Colossal and CNET, cover image via Wonders of Street View]