Have you ever watched a sci-fi movie or played a video game and wondered what your home and neighborhood would look like if the human race were wiped out? If so you might want to seek counseling, or you can visit this website to seek closure on your thoughts of inevitable doom.

It’s called Urban Jungle Street View and it makes use of Google Maps interactive Street View system but decorates everything to look as if it hadn’t been touched by human hands for decades.

This website designed by Einar Öberg as an experiment with the depth data used in Google Street View. Using these values he plotted green grass and trees on the road as well as ivy creeping up building sides and hanging from utility wires. Nature really does appear to be reclaiming the land that we humans have wrested from it throughout our existence.

Öberg recommends using this overlaying effect in a heavily urbanized area like New York City for the best results. Tall buildings often result in the best effects whereas doing it out in the countryside will basically put grass on top of grass.

▼ Behold! Mt. Fuji’s summit after “the collapse” shall have a tree and some grass.

We took it for a spin around the Shinjuku and Shibuya areas of Tokyo. Sure enough it looked very reminiscent of the PS3’s Tokyo Jungle and The Last of Us, where players assume the role of survivors wandering around cities after the near total annihilation of humankind.

Good to see that even the billboard of SMAP’s Takuya Kimura stands eternal. One day alien researchers may stumble upon it and think we worshiped him as a god. He was pretty good in Hero, so I guess it could be worse. In some scenes the crowds of people broke the illusion but overall it’s a fun little piece of coding that you can enjoy while virtually prowling the streets of the world.

Source: Urban Jungle Street View, Einar Öberg
Original Article by Mr. Sato

▼ Just enter the name of the location you want and if Street View is available then you can see it all post-apocalyptic style.

▼ You can also move the little adventurer pegman to any location just as in regular Google Maps.

[ Read in Japanese ]