This free app takes you on a virtual car ride through cities around the world.
It’s been a while since I’ve been able to enjoy driving or riding in a car through another city, taking in the sights and the sounds while listening to local radio. If you miss it as much as I do, check out Drive & Listen.
The app allows you to take a virtual drive through more than 50 cities around the world (interestingly, one is Wuhan, China) while listening to real-time local radio and the sounds of street life as you go. It’s like Google Street View, but a virtual reality version where you don’t have to click to move your position.
The app is oddly addictive. When you first visit, you briefly see black-and-white TV static. Then, as if someone has changed the channel, a full screen shot of a street somewhere appears, and the footage (and you) are rolling. You might find yourself coming to a stop at a red light in downtown Dublin, or cornering through a snowstorm in Oslo. Then the radio stream loads, and all of a sudden you have the sensation of really being in a car, cruising from Point A to Point B. It feels if not exactly real, really close to what you remember as real.
To qualify as top-notch VR, the virtual experience must mimic the real one. Objects and distances have to be the right sizes and dimensions—not too big, not too far away, not too high off the ground. Drive & Listen accomplishes all this with uncanny consistency. Almost all of the driving footage is shot in crystal-clear 4K, and the view is driver’s-eye level. As you move forward, you see and feel the road disappear beneath you. A car appears from your blind spot. You pass a cyclist. Street signs are most legible when you’re closest. The radio goes from song to advertisement to announcer to song again (or news program, if you’ve chosen NPR in NYC).
To pick a city to drive through, you just scroll and click. Don’t like where you started out at? Click the city’s name again and you’ll begin at a different place on the route. (Most places have two or three starting points.) Each city offers a few listening options or you can silence the radio completely, if that’s what you prefer.
You can also decide how fast you want to go and whether you want to hear outside sounds—the roar of wind, the hum of car engines, the blare of car horns. The app is free; if you like it, you can buy the Turkish grad student who created it (he’s studying in Munich and this was his homesickness antidote) a cup of coffee to show your appreciation.
What I intended to be just a few-minute drive through Dublin quickly turned into almost a half hour as I added detours to New York (the honking!), Tokyo, and Barcelona. I really felt as though I were back in some of my favorite cities. That’s the magic of the app: it brought close places that otherwise feel far away right now. Drive & Listen and you’ll see what I mean.
Twist’s Take: Take a drive through a foreign city listening to local radio with this free app.
