Earlier this week, we launched the public release of Street Peekaboo, a simple daily game built on top of our real-world street imagery.
Every day, players are dropped into a new location somewhere in the world and given ten seconds to find a hidden kookaburra. The challenge sounds simple. Look around, scan the street, and spot the bird before time runs out. Yet it quickly becomes an exercise in observation, curiosity, and urban exploration.
Play here: https://streetpeekaboo.com/
Explore a New City Every Day
Unlike fictional game worlds, Street Peekaboo uses real 360° street-level imagery from cities, towns, and neighbourhoods around the globe.
One day, you might find yourself on a quiet residential street in Melbourne. The next day could be a bustling avenue in London, a suburban road in Bangkok, or a village lane somewhere in Europe.
The result is a small daily window into how people live, move, and build communities around the world.
For geography enthusiasts, travellers, urbanists, and anyone curious about cities, the game offers a surprisingly engaging way to discover places you may never have encountered otherwise.
A Daily Challenge Inspired by Wordle
Street Peekaboo follows a familiar daily game format. Everyone receives the same challenge each day. No sign-in is required to play, although players can create an account if they'd like to appear on the leaderboard.
After completing the challenge, players can share a Wordle-style scorecard with friends and family, compare times, and challenge others to beat their result.
Like many daily games, the goal is not to spend hours playing. It's designed to be a quick, enjoyable ritual that takes less than a minute.
Why Street Scenes Are Fascinating
Human beings are remarkably good at interpreting environments. Within moments of looking at a street, we form impressions about safety, walkability, attractiveness, wealth, maintenance, and activity. We notice trees, footpaths, shopfronts, traffic, architecture, and countless other details, often without consciously realizing it.
Street Peekaboo turns this natural ability into a game.
Finding the hidden kookaburra requires players to rapidly scan a scene and identify unusual objects within a complex visual environment. In doing so, players end up paying attention to details that might otherwise go unnoticed.
A Small Game With a Bigger Vision
At its core, Street Peekaboo is simply a fun daily challenge. But there is also a larger idea behind it.
If the game grows into a sizeable global community, it could become an interesting platform for understanding how people perceive urban environments. Questions about walkability, safety, attractiveness, memorability, and sense of place are often difficult to study at scale.
A large population of players interacting with street scenes could potentially create opportunities for new kinds of research into urban perception and city design.
Of course, that future is far from guaranteed. Street Peekaboo may eventually grow into a valuable experimental platform. Or it may simply become another one of the thousands of online games that briefly capture attention before fading away. That's the nature of building things on the internet.
For now, we're excited to share it with the world and see what happens next.
Try today's challenge at https://streetpeekaboo.com/ and let us know how quickly you can find the kookaburra.