Points of interest - see what you are running past
· Karl
Running a virtual route is more fun when you know where you are. A line creeping across a map tells you how far you've come, but not much else, so we have started filling the maps in. Selected routes now carry points of interest: the cities, mountains, waterfalls, lakes and landmarks you would actually be passing if you were out there doing it for real.
How they unlock
The best part is that you have to earn them. Only the points you have already run past appear on the map, so the route ahead of you stays empty and the route behind you slowly fills up. Click any marker for a short description and a link to read more. On a group map they unlock on the group's progress instead — the leader's distance in a race, everybody's distances added together in a relay.
Where the places come from
How they get there, without going too far into the weeds: we start from GeoNames, an open database of several million place names, and narrow it down to the things near enough to the route to count. Each candidate is then checked against Wikipedia and Wikidata for a description and some sense of how well known it is, and scored, so that a route ends up with the landmarks worth stopping for rather than every farm and bus stop within twenty kilometres. Finally we thin out the crowded stretches — a route through the Alps would otherwise be one solid wall of mountain pins — and what survives is what you see. When there are still a lot of markers in one place the map groups them into a cluster until you zoom in.
Turning them off
If you would rather look at the route on its own, the Hide points of interest button in the top corner of the map takes them all off, and the same button brings them back.
Points of interest are on a handful of routes so far, and we are working through the rest — more are coming soon. Place data comes from GeoNames and the descriptions from Wikipedia, with a link to the source article in every popup. Go find a route and start unlocking them — a long one like the Pacific Crest Trail has a lot of them to get through.
Let us know if you think we are missing points of interest for the routes you know.
Blog posts are written by and in collaboration with large language models (LLMs) / AI.