![]() To pick a city, you just scroll and click. ![]() It’s that it makes you feel like you’re in control, or something close to it. The appeal of Drive & Listen isn’t just that it mimics the feeling of being in a car with the radio on. Was that a Bank of America on my left? Street signs are clearest when you’re closest. The radio goes from song to song to advertisement. As you move forward, you see and feel the road disappear beneath you. Almost all of the driving footage is shot in crystal-clear 4K, and whether you’re in Rome or Chicago, the view is driver’s-eye level. Drive & Listen accomplishes that with uncanny consistency. Objects and distances have to be the right sizes and dimensions. One of the tricks to creating a (quasi) VR experience is making sure the virtual world mimics the real one. It feels not exactly real, but close to what you remember as real. I think that is partly why I’ve been on the site so much. Then the radio stream loads, and all of a sudden there is that unmistakable feeling of moving through the world, trying to get from where you are to where you’re going. You might be rolling to a stop at a red light in the central business district of Buenos Aires, or rolling onto a nondescript street in Prague. Then, as if someone has changed the channel, you see a full screen shot of a street somewhere, and the footage (and you) are rolling. When you first visit, you briefly see black and white TV static. In this last year of teleworking and a world closed down, I have found a strange comfort in just driving around, with no direction or purpose other than…driving and listening. He must have been thinking of folks like me. “I realized that other people around the world must be missing that same experience of being on the road,” he told Lonely Planet. Drive & ListenĮrkam Şeker, the Turkish graduate student who created Drive & Listen, says the idea was born from pandemic-induced nostalgia for driving around Istanbul with the radio on. Petersburg to “Sweet Dreams.” Or Biscayne Boulevard to Bad Bunny.Ī morning drive through Mumbai. You can drive, then coast, through Mumbai while listening to what folks listen to in Mumbai. It’s like Google Streetview, but the virtual reality version, and you don’t have to click to move.Īnd there’s music. The app allows you to take a virtual drive through more than 50 cities around the world while listening to real-time local radio and the sounds of street life as you go. Maybe that’s why I’ve been spending so much time on the new app Drive & Listen-it taps into two things that just go together. I always thought it was a rule: When you drive, you supposed to make folks listen. And if it ain’t a old-school, it's probably got sounds, custom-installed subs that makes the bass sound far away and tweeters that make the hi-hat seem right beside you. ![]() Just about everybody I know got a “old-school”-a pre-1990, domestic car that always needs just a little bit of work to get back on the road. Where I’m from in North Mississippi, cars and music just go together. ![]()
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