But with two additional twists:
1. It loads up historical maps from different years (right now 1 BC, 700 AD, 1000 AD, 1300 AD, 1800 AD, 1900 AD) so you can see what you would hit if you had a time machine AND you went in the direction your phone is pointing
2. Tap a country/territory for an (AI-generated) blurb on what you are pointing at
How it works: Starting from your phone’s bearing, we trace the great-circle in 200 km steps, prefilter candidate countries with bounding boxes (~5–10 instead of ~200), then check ~20 km points along each segment to catch coastlines and stop when the path first enters another country.
Great-circles (https://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong.html) are why you can hit Australia from NYC, even though when you look at a flat map that can be hard to see.
There might be some weird stuff in the explanations, I haven’t read all 1,400 of them. If you see something weird let me know and I will update it!
The app is free and doesn’t have ads or tracking — your location and bearing are only used locally to figure out where you are and what you’re pointing at
Probably will work best if you hold your phone pretty flat :)
Thank you to André Ourednik and all the contributors to the Historical Basemaps project: https://github.com/aourednik/historical-basemaps)
umanwizard•5mo ago
One of the countries in 1800 renders as “M?ori” for me, so it looks like you have some kind of character encoding issues (or there’s some language I don’t know about where ? is a letter).
Feature request: is there a way to get a blurb about one’s current country? Lots of people on this site will get “Viceroyalty of New Spain” (the pre-independence name of Mexico, which included the entire current American Southwest incl. California and Texas) when they switch to 1800 and might want to learn more about it.
robinhouston•5mo ago
foxglacier•5mo ago