City walks, the trend of discovering cities without leaving home
Have you visited Athens? Have you been to Berlin? Have you walked the streets of Rome, Milan or Venice? And have you discovered amazing corners in London, Paris, Barcelona or Madrid? Travelling has become a common pleasure for millions of people, but the current situation caused by the COVID pandemic has changed everything, and moving around other countries has now become very complicated. Fortunately, the digital world offers us interesting alternatives to almost any handicap.
For years, the videos that discover the cities, their architecture, their streets, their shops... have been circulating on YouTube, offering endless virtual walks. Many of these videos are made with high quality footage, shot with camera in hand, offering a first person perspective, which allows us to reproduce the sensations of walking through the streets of variouscities. These long-running videos capture the views and sounds of those cities.
Walking virtually through major cities
Those of us who are dedicated to the Real Estate know that no virtual tour can make an emotional impact on a traveler to the same degree as physical travel: smells, first impressions when turning a corner and discovering for the first time a street or place, the thermal sensation... However, until we can regain the possibility of traveling for pleasure to other countries or cities, virtual travel is presented to us as a more than interesting and necessary alternative.
The City Walks platform collects these videos for all of us and organizes them so that we can take a virtual tour of Asian, European and American cities. The list is very long and includes the main tourist cities. Although, the best thing about the City Walks proposal is that the walks they propose are very local, refusing the typical tourist routes to enter authentic neighborhoods where we can live a much more immersive experience.
A window to the world, at street level
Using virtual reality goggles or directly from the screen of our computer, our TV or smartphone, City Walks helps us to travel the world at street level without leaving home. We won't have to queue to get on the plane or deliver the passport to customs. We will simply put the browser in full screen and enjoy hours and hours of virtual walks.
The Greeks Aristomenis Georgiopoulos and Artemis Stiga are responsible for this ingenious application, which integrates full-screen videos on the website. In addition to video selection, the app's developers have made improvements to help us enjoy walking down the street through YouTube videos. To do this, you only have to choose the city that you want to visit, turn on or off the sound and select between day and night. Even among their latest developments, they have included an option called "walking during the Covid-19", in which to rediscover the cities as we could find them today if we were an indigenous person of each of them.
Or, if you prefer, take a car trip
As noted, City Walks is inspired by the dozens of videos that abound on YouTube about virtual walks, but the idea of putting these videos together on a website is part of a similar project called Drive & Listen. What we are offered on this other page is the possibility to be able to travel to cities around the world from the perspective of a car driver. But with the advantages of not leaving the house and not needing a driver's license, neither paying gas nor tolls, of course!
Barcelona, Amsterdam, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Dublin, Hawaii, Guadalajara, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Melbourne, Miami, Moscow, Munich, New York, Nice, Paris, Rome, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Toronto, Warsaw... The list is endless, and we know you'll have days to complete all the routes.
And to make the virtual tour more attractive, you can also choose the speed of the vehicle, turn the ambient sound on or off and even launch a radio station to enjoy your trip with some music.
Although this trend helps us not to give up our desire to travel, while helping us to accentuate the desire to discover interesting cities, still inhospit for our feet, ATYOU is confident that we can reach a new normality in which moving between countries calmly, with all the security guarantees, is a more immediate reality than a future.
