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changelog

Changelog

What shipped, week by week. Each entry is one meaningful beat, not a raw commit list. The build chip on the title screen always points to the newest one.

  1. 2026-09-21 · v2026.09.21.1

    Long straight streets run smoother, and slow laptops recover faster

    • ·Faint, far-off splats that were too small to see are no longer drawn. Looking down a long street is about a sixth lighter on the graphics card in our tests, and the picture looks the same.
    • ·When a laptop turns out to be far too slow for a place, the detail now steps down in one go instead of over about twelve seconds of stutter.
    • ·Measured on a laptop so far, not yet on every phone. If a place still stutters for you, please say so on the contact page.

  2. 2026-09-21 · v2026.09.21

    A front page made for phones

    • ·On a phone the front page now opens like picking a stage in a game: the place fills the screen, you swipe or tap the arrows to go through all ten, choose walk, ride, fly or drive, and press start. A way in that a place does not have shows as locked.
    • ·The rest of the page is the same story set for a thumb, with bigger text and buttons, and it turns properly when the phone is held sideways. Once the first start button scrolls away, a smaller one stays at the bottom of the screen.

  3. 2026-09-20 · v2026.09.20.2

    In progress: relighting, aiming past DLSS 5, in a browser tab

    • ·Not in the game yet. It is the biggest thing being worked on, and the first pieces of it are the car entries below.
    • ·Every place here is a photograph, so it already has real light in it, but it cannot answer to light it never saw. The work is a lamp shone into a captured street that lights the real brick and throws a real shadow, and a sun that can be found in a capture and moved.
    • ·The bar is DLSS 5, which repaints a game frame to look photographed and needs one of the newest graphics cards to do it. We start from the photograph, and we are trying to go past that picture in a browser tab, on the machine you already have, with nothing to install.
    • ·As far as we can find, nobody has shown that yet. The details stay close until there are pictures to put next to the photograph.

  4. 2026-09-20 · v2026.09.20.1

    In progress: places that move, with 4D Gaussian splatting

    • ·Not in the game yet, and not a date.
    • ·Every place here is one instant: still air, fixed light, and anyone who walked through the shot smeared or gone. 4D Gaussian splatting is the same kind of capture with time in it, a place as it was over a stretch of time instead of a single moment.
    • ·That is where leaves in the wind, moving water, cloud shadows crossing a square and a sun that travels have to come from. Drawn on top of a photograph they would be effects; captured, they are the place.
    • ·It is being built together with the relighting, since a moving sun needs a street that can take new light. The first step works: a photographed splat can change its light on every frame in the browser. Making it move on every frame is the next thing to measure.

  5. 2026-09-20 · v2026.09.20

    Phones are in: drive, walk, ride and fly with your thumbs

    • ·The phone work below is live. A phone with WebGPU, which means Chrome on Android 12 or later or Safari on iOS 26, opens straight into the place.
    • ·Driving, walking, the bicycle and the drone each have touch controls drawn on screen and sized for a thumb. Pause is a round button at the top, every load has a way back out, and a phone without the graphics hardware gets a page saying why.
    • ·Still in testing: telling phones that have the browser but not the hardware, before they overheat. That goes out with the next deploy.
    • ·Older phones are still being measured one at a time. If it runs badly on yours, please say so on the contact page.

  6. 2026-09-19 · v2026.09.19.11

    In testing: phones that cannot run it are told so, instead of overheating

    • ·Still in testing. It goes out with the next deploy.
    • ·Some phones have a browser that can run this but not the hardware for it: the town came out magenta, the phone got hot, and the tab crashed or froze. Those phones now get a clear page saying the device cannot run it yet, before anything loads.
    • ·Phones with less than 4 GB of memory are stopped straight away. Any device that struggles once, with a frame rate stuck under five frames a second, a graphics chip that gives up, or a tab that crashes, is stopped at once and remembered, so it is not put through it again.
    • ·There is a "try anyway" link for anyone who wants to risk it. If it then plays without trouble, the device is let back in for good.

  7. 2026-09-19 · v2026.09.19.10

    In testing: the car goes into the shade in Olsztyn

    • ·Still in testing. It goes out with the next deploy.
    • ·Olsztyn was photographed on a sunny day, and the car stayed in full sun even under the trees and in the shadow of the buildings. It now takes the shade where the photograph has shade, and comes back into the sun where the street does.
    • ·Only Olsztyn so far. The shade is where it was on the day of the photograph, and the car is in it or out of it as a whole.

  8. 2026-09-19 · v2026.09.19.9

    In testing: the first walk no longer snaps into a stiff pose

    • ·Still in testing. It goes out with the next deploy.
    • ·The first time you walked after a place loaded, the arms and legs could snap into a stiff pose for a moment. The walking animations arrived just after the loading screen lifted, and switching over to them showed the bare skeleton for a frame. They now load behind the loading screen.

  9. 2026-09-19 · v2026.09.19.8

    A quieter car that lands softly, and no cards on a phone

    • ·The car is quieter: the engine and the tyres are half as loud. The engine slider in Settings still works on top of that.
    • ·The car used to appear half a metre above the road and drop onto it, bouncing for two seconds. It now appears already resting on the road.
    • ·On a phone the welcome card and the controls cards no longer pop up. The controls are drawn on screen, and CONTROLS in the pause screen still shows them.

  10. 2026-09-19 · v2026.09.19.7

    In testing: the car dims under trees and in narrow lanes

    • ·Still in testing. It goes out with the next deploy.
    • ·The car took the same light everywhere in a town, so under a tree or between tall walls it shone as brightly as in the open square. In Ludlow it now takes the light of the spot it stands on, and dims where the street around it is dim.
    • ·Only Ludlow has this so far. The car takes one light at a time, so a car half under a tree is lit as if it were all under it.

  11. 2026-09-19 · v2026.09.19.6

    In testing: the car sits in the light of the place

    • ·Still in testing. It goes out with the next deploy.
    • ·Every place lit the car with the same bright midday sun, though most of them were photographed on a grey day. In those the car now takes the soft light of the photograph: no hard highlights, and its sides lit by the sky instead of going dark. A white car now reads about as bright as the white window frames around it.
    • ·The car also sits on the road now, with a soft shadow underneath it where it blocks the sky. The places photographed in sunshine keep a sun, now aimed where the sun in the photograph was and as strong and as warm as it was there, with the sky lighting the side turned away from it.

  12. 2026-09-19 · v2026.09.19.5

    The car is there when the loading screen lifts

    • ·Opening a place in the car, the car only started loading once the loading screen had gone, so for a moment you saw a red block where the car should be. The car now loads behind the loading screen, and the screen lifts with you already in it.
    • ·Switching to the car later, the red block no longer shows while the car loads. The car appears when it is ready.

  13. 2026-09-19 · v2026.09.19.4

    In testing: the camera stays out of the walls

    • ·Still in testing. It goes out with the next deploy.
    • ·In a narrow street the camera behind the car could end up inside a building, and the whole screen went to a blur of wall. It now moves in toward the car when a wall is in the way, and lifts a little when that is not enough, so the car stays in view. It never rises above the rooftops, which were never photographed.
    • ·Leaves, signs and walls right against the camera used to smear across the picture. They now fade out as the camera gets close. Where the camera is still caught behind a wall you may see a dark gap there instead of a blur.

  14. 2026-09-19 · v2026.09.19.3

    Fewer stutters after a town loads, and a first touch that does not jump

    • ·On a phone the picture kept stepping up its detail in the first seconds after a town appeared, and every step stuttered while you were moving. The extra detail now arrives when you pause, so the stutter lands on a still frame. If the phone is struggling, detail still drops at once.
    • ·The first touch took the page full screen while a thumb could still be on a stick, and the stick jumped. Full screen now waits until every finger is off the glass, and if the screen changes shape under a held stick anyway, the stick lets go instead of jumping.
    • ·Frames came late while a thumb was moving a control, a small judder only when steering. They land on time now. Climbing or descending the drone no longer counts as standing still, which used to halve the frame rate.
    • ·The drone camera stops turning the moment you let go of its stick, rather than drifting on a few degrees.

  15. 2026-09-19 · v2026.09.19.2

    New drone controls on a phone

    • ·The drone used a radio controller layout, and turning was hidden on the sides of the left stick. It now flies like a game: the left stick moves you forward, back and sideways, and the right stick is the camera. Hold it left or right to keep turning, up or down to tilt.
    • ·UP and DOWN sit beside the right stick; hold them to climb and descend. You can still drag the empty screen to look around, as on foot.
    • ·A sideways push on the camera stick only turns, so a slow pan does not drift up into the sky. Each stick is labelled with what it does.
    • ·The sticks sat partly over the bottom bar, so a thumb landing low on the left one could switch you into the car. They sit above it now.

  16. 2026-09-19 · v2026.09.19.1

    In testing: the lower picture settings stop being soft

    • ·Still in testing. It goes out with the next deploy.
    • ·Every picture setting below the highest drew the world bigger than the frame it was drawing into and then shrank it to fit, which is why Balanced and Performance looked softer than they should have. They draw at the right size now: a much sharper picture at the same speed.

  17. 2026-09-19 · v2026.09.19

    A walk that stops when you let go, and a picture that keeps its shape

    • ·The mark that keeps you walking hands-free sat just past the edge of the stick, and a thumb pushing hard to run goes just past the edge, so a run you let go of could keep walking. It sits further out now, only switches on once you have rested a thumb on it, reads STOP while it is on, and a tap stops you.
    • ·The camera swings gently round behind you as you walk, so pushing the stick sideways turns you instead of walking you across the screen. It waits while you are dragging to look around.
    • ·On some phones the whole picture came out stretched sideways. The game now re-measures the screen whenever a phone rotates, goes full screen or hides its address bar.
    • ·The pause screen on a phone is a square card in the middle, resume on top, rather than a wide strip across it.
    • ·On the bicycle, the steering arc now turns you all the way round: U-turns and circles without dragging the view, with the camera following behind. It used to steer toward wherever the camera pointed, which on a phone only moves when you drag it.

  18. 2026-09-18 · v2026.09.18

    Walking on a phone with one thumb

    • ·Walking used the car’s controls: a speed lever and a steering arc, two thumbs, no way to step sideways. It has a stick of its own now in the bottom-left. Push it the way you want to go and you walk that way relative to the camera, and the body turns to face its path. The rest of the screen is for looking around.
    • ·Two paces and nothing in between: inside the ring you walk, at its edge you run. A stick pushed partway used to ask for a shuffle too slow for the animation to match, so the feet slid.
    • ·Slide the stick up past the ring onto the lock mark and you keep walking while you look around. A tap cannot set it, which matters: a stray tap used to send the walker off across town.
    • ·Parts of the walker could vanish, leaving a torso with no head or legs. It is drawn solid now and fades with a fine dither when the camera closes in.

  19. 2026-09-15 · v2026.09.15

    A phone that fails politely, and a count of when it does

    • ·A slow connection could end a load on an error that never cleared, while the download was still arriving. Bytes arriving now count as progress, time in another app no longer counts against the load, and the card takes itself down the moment the place is ready.
    • ·Some phones offer the graphics interface this needs with nothing behind it. Walking took that at its word and failed with engine jargon; it now asks for the hardware first, as driving always has, and a phone that cannot run it gets the page explaining why. That page no longer appears sideways, and it now names Safari 26 and iOS 26 rather than iOS 18.
    • ·Walking pauses when you leave the tab, as driving does, and sound stops with it. On an iPhone, sound cut off by a call comes back.
    • ·A phone downloads a fifth of the ground it used to before a town appears: four to five megabytes instead of twenty-two, within a few centimetres of every step and kerb.
    • ·Loads that stall or fail, phones that drop the graphics, and tabs the phone closes for memory each leave one event now, under the same opt-out in Settings as everything else. Until now they were invisible.

  20. 2026-09-11 · v2026.09.11.1

    A control that stopped answering

    • ·The controls would stop working after five or ten minutes on a phone. A browser can take a gesture away from the page mid-drag for its own back-swipe or a system panel, and it does not always say so, leaving the steering arc following a finger that had gone. Every touch after that looked like a second finger arriving, so it ignored them all. The brake and boost buttons had the same hole, where a stuck button keeps braking with nothing on screen to release.
    • ·There was no way back out of a load on a phone. Both driving and walking now have a back button at the top left that a thumb can hit.
    • ·A phone asks for a quarter of the memory it used to when a place opens, sized to what the place actually needs rather than one number for all of them, and climbs if your phone proves it can hold more.

  21. 2026-09-11 · v2026.09.11

    In progress: what a phone really costs, and light that behaves

    • ·Nothing here has shipped. It is being worked on alongside the demo and it is better to say so than to go quiet.
    • ·The numbers a phone runs on were argued rather than measured, and they are being measured now. The pause screen on a phone prints frame rate, scene size and drawing resolution so they can come off a real device instead of a desk.
    • ·A captured place is a photograph, so it already contains real light. What it does not contain is any reaction to what we put into it: the car casts no shadow on the street and does not reflect the road. The first of those now works behind a switch and is being tested.
    • ·Rendering fewer pixels and rebuilding the full picture from several frames of them is also being tried, which is the technique behind the upscaling in modern games. Whether it buys frames on a phone is the one number that has to come off a real device.

  22. 2026-09-10 · v2026.09.10.1

    The phone controls stop covering each other

    • ·Pausing was a settings cog nineteen pixels wide, in the corner where a phone keeps its own back and home gestures. There is now a round pause button on the top edge, in the middle, and the card it opens leads with a large resume.
    • ·The words that switch between driving, walking, riding and flying were twenty-six pixels tall against a floor of forty-four. Every one of them is a proper target now.
    • ·Letting go of the steering used to snap the wheel to centre in a single frame, which reads as the control switching off. It unwinds over about a fifth of a second now, and the throttle glides to its stop when you brake. The brake still cuts the engine the same instant.
    • ·A tap on its own now sets nothing. The throttle read a touch anywhere along it as a position, so on foot one brush of the screen edge sent you walking with no obvious way to stop.
    • ·Nothing on the phone screen sits on anything else. The messages that used to stack up over the controls are one band now, in the part of the screen no control wants, holding one thing at a time.

  23. 2026-09-10 · v2026.09.10

    In testing: the black boxes in the streamed towns

    • ·The corrected data is already in the asset bucket and every deployment reads it, so this is live wherever the edge cache has turned over. Marked in testing because it has not been confirmed on the machine that reported it.
    • ·A day after detail was allowed to step back for frame rate, black patches appeared in the streamed towns. Each town is cut into thousands of cells kept at several levels of detail, and at the sparse edges of a capture some cells had nothing at the coarsest levels, so the renderer drew nothing at all. It never showed while detail was pinned high.
    • ·The fix is in the data rather than the page: those cells now carry an entry at every level. A few hundred more splats per town at the lowest detail, out of hundreds of thousands, and a test now fails if any cell ever lacks a level again.

  24. 2026-09-08 · v2026.09.08

    In testing: a place that opens at full detail and then holds a frame rate

    • ·Still in testing. It goes out with the next deploy.
    • ·Every place opened at the most detail your machine is trusted with, and nothing was allowed to answer if that turned out to be too much. On the bigger captures it often was, giving a sharp town at a frame rate that felt heavy to move through.
    • ·Detail now steps back when the frame rate falls under 25, aiming for 30, and comes back on its own once it recovers. Between 25 and 32 it does nothing, which is the part that took the work: the previous version chased two or three frames nobody was missing and always ended at a soft town.
    • ·It no longer watches the loading, which is a judgement on your connection rather than your machine. The switch is still in Settings under frame rate vs detail.

  25. 2026-09-04 · v2026.09.04.1

    Looking right turns you right

    • ·Every way of looking around on foot turned the wrong way: the mouse, a finger, the right stick on a controller and the steering arc on a phone, each doing the same sum with the same sign wrong. They share one piece of maths now.
    • ·It had been that way a while. In a car you steer rather than look, and the chase camera puts the view back behind you every frame, so nothing surfaced it until the village captures started opening on foot.

  26. 2026-09-04 · v2026.09.04

    A quicker front page, and product pages that describe themselves

    • ·The photograph the front-page cloud resolves into is also where those points get their colour, so nothing painted until it had arrived. It now ships at 227 kB instead of 532, the same frame at the same size, and downloads alongside the code instead of queueing behind it.
    • ·The drive and explore pages carried almost no text in the file the server actually sends, so anything reading a page without a graphics card was handed an empty shell. Both now carry a heading, a description and real links to the real places. It is not drawn on screen, but it is in the page and in the accessibility tree, which gives a screen reader a landmark on what is otherwise a bare canvas.

  27. 2026-09-03 · v2026.09.03

    The phone console, and what a phone can spend

    • ·Pause, settings, the map and the controls card were laid out for a laptop and mostly off the screen on a phone. Each has a short-screen version now: pause is one card, settings puts its categories in a strip along the top, the map is a small plate you tap to open, and the controls clear themselves after twelve seconds.
    • ·A handheld draws thirty frames a second, and fifteen when nothing is moving, while physics, input and the readouts keep running every tick. The controls stay as responsive; the part that drains a battery does not run flat out.
    • ·Two things that had never worked by touch now do: the car on the explore pages took keyboard only, and the Gstaad aeroplane had no touch path at all. Wiring both through the same deck also handed the explore car a game controller.

  28. 2026-09-02 · v2026.09.02.1

    Phones go into the place, not into a wall

    • ·A phone used to be turned away on its user-agent string, before anything asked what it could do. Phones now take the same capability test as every other device and land in the same engine, or on the same compatibility page if they fail it.
    • ·The car, the bicycle and walking share one set of touch controls, drawn on screen the whole time: a speed lever up the left edge that holds where you leave it, a steering arc up the right, and four word buttons that say what they do rather than being a glyph to learn. On foot two of them become run and jump.
    • ·Steering is proportional. The on-screen controls could only press the same left and right keys a keyboard sends, so a phone got full lock or nothing while a game controller got a real axis.
    • ·The aeroplane and the drones get a radio transmitter instead: two sticks laid out the way a drone pilot already holds one.
    • ·Add ?touch=1 to a drive or explore address and the touch controls appear in a desktop browser, worked with the mouse. That is how they were designed and the quickest way to see them without a phone.

  29. 2026-09-02 · v2026.09.02

    The car drives on the road it can see

    • ·Ludlow, the place most people drive, had been driving on a flat plane laid under the whole town rather than on the town itself, since the ninth of August. Within forty-five metres of where the car appears, 94% of the scanned ground stands above that plane by about a metre: the road climbed the hill and the car did not. It has a baked ground of its own now, and on a simulated lap the sustained roughness falls from 1.01 g to 0.31.
    • ·That also withdraws something said here last week. Ludlow was called the worst-driving capture in the set on the strength of a measurement that was real and was measuring the plane, not the town.
    • ·On eight of the ten places the car started underneath the road, because a car is built the instant a place opens and the ground it stands on has to arrive. Gravity is now held off it until its ground lands. All ten places rest within three centimetres of the road you can see; before this, eight sat between 0.67 and 6.54 m under it.
    • ·Lourmarin, Aix, La Sarraz and La Filature lead with walking now. They are village lanes and the longest straight in one of them is about sixteen metres. Nothing is taken away: all four still drive.
    • ·The theme plays over the loading screen on a cold open. A browser holds sound frozen until the page has been touched, so music scheduled before your first key press was not quiet, it was waiting.

  30. 2026-08-31 · v2026.08.31.5

    The music plays while a place is loading

    • ·The theme is meant to score the wait and then step back. It was doing neither: nothing was scheduled until a file request came back, and on a loading screen that request queues behind the place itself, so the music turned up as the place did and then faded out on cue. It starts when the screen appears now.
    • ·It is also about nine decibels louder. The theme lost that much level when it was rewritten for solo piano, and the tool used to compare arrangements matches their loudness before playing them, which is precisely how you stop hearing a loudness problem. There is a separate check now that measures what reaches the speakers.
    • ·A deployed build was also refusing to use recorded audio anywhere it existed, having read an index built where the recordings are not kept and concluded there were none.

  31. 2026-08-31 · v2026.08.31.4

    In progress: phones, and captures that move

    • ·Nothing here has shipped. Two things are being worked on alongside the demo and it is better to say what they are than to go quiet.
    • ·Phones. A phone meets a compatibility wall today rather than a place. The browser support that wall waits on is arriving on its own, so the work is on the other side of it: what a captured place actually costs on a phone, tested across a spread of devices rather than one flagship.
    • ·Captures that move. Everything drivable here is one frozen moment: still air, fixed light, and anything that moved during the capture smeared or gone. Capture that changes over time is being tried, separately from the demo. It is early, and it is not a date.

  32. 2026-08-31 · v2026.08.31.3

    Arriving on the picture, not on the loading of it

    • ·A place used to appear soft and sharpen in front of you. That was the loading screen lifting the moment anything at all was drawable, which is always the lowest-detail version. It waits for the detail your machine is going to run at now, so the first frame you see is the one you keep.
    • ·Nothing about how much is loaded has changed. The wait is a little longer and it is capped, so a stalled download uncovers the place rather than stranding you.
    • ·Settings, Display has a switch for the other half: whether the frame rate may lower quality once you are in. It is off, which is what it has quietly been for a while.

  33. 2026-08-31 · v2026.08.31.2

    The drone is the whole drone

    • ·The quad was missing its camera, aerial, battery and wiring. They were in the original model all along, in a second group left behind when the file was cut down for the download.
    • ·Its propellers turned about a point a good way off their motors, so they swung rather than spun. Each turns about its own axis now, a tenth of a millimetre from the shaft it sits on.

  34. 2026-08-31 · v2026.08.31.1

    Sound on foot, on the bike and in the air

    • ·Walking, riding and flying make noise now. They always had voices; getting out of the car was silencing the whole page, so the only way back was to pause and unpause, which also restarted the engine of the car you had just left.
    • ·The theme scores the loading screen and then steps out of the way, fading over five seconds and leaving the street to it. The title screen keeps it.

  35. 2026-08-30 · v2026.08.30.1

    A drone you fly, not one you point

    • ·The Gstaad car park has a second way to fly it. The sticks turn the aircraft rather than steer it, nothing levels itself, and letting go while upside down does what letting go while upside down does. Press F to switch. It is offered there and nowhere else, because a car park with pillars is somewhere to practise and a street is not.
    • ·The camera drone sits at head height and stays there. It used to climb on its own, sometimes several metres, with nobody touching anything.
    • ·The chase camera sits closer behind the car and the drone; near the edge of a place the old one could end up outside the scan looking back in. The driver view lost a dark smear above the dashboard, which was a shadow landing in the wrong place.

  36. 2026-08-30 · v2026.08.30

    One tune, on a piano, everywhere

    • ·There is one theme now and it is the same one in every town. The version before gave each place its own phrase worked out from its coordinates, which was a good story and could never have done the job: you know a game from four notes because they are the same four notes every time. Per-place identity moved into the key instead, so each town transposes and still sounds like itself.
    • ·It is played on a piano, and it moves. The background used to hum, which was not a matter of taste: chords were held at a constant level for three and a half seconds at a time, which the ear reads as a key held down rather than as harmony. Every note is struck and decays now.
    • ·The title screen had been playing it all along, about fifteen decibels below the point where anyone would notice. The number holding it down was written months earlier for a soft pad whose whole job was staying out of the way.
    • ·None of it is a download. The music is a few kilobytes of instructions for building the sound in the browser.

  37. 2026-08-29 · v2026.08.29

    Every place plays its own coordinates

    • ·The numbers at the top of the screen, the ones that say this is a real street and not a set, are now also the tune. Ludlow is 52.3680 north, 2.7202 west, and those digits pick the notes. The rhythm and the first and last notes are the same everywhere, so all of them are recognisably one piece.
    • ·There had been no music in any town at all. The system was wired into the mixer and onto the volume slider and played nothing, because it could only play recordings and there were none. Every other sound here is built from oscillators with recordings as an optional upgrade; music was the only part that was not, which is how it went missing without anything noticing.
    • ·The music follows what you are doing: a slow chord parked, a pulse under it driving, an octave opening at speed in the one gap the engine leaves.
    • ·Walking, riding and flying get the instrument panel the car has, reading speed against what that particular mover can do, in km/h rather than two units for the same thing. The slot where the car prints its gear holds your gait on foot, your cadence on the bike, and your height above whatever is under you in the drone.

  38. 2026-08-28 · v2026.08.28

    You can get over a wall, and the car has a road under it

    • ·The map was a mirror, drawing each place with left and right swapped, so it turned you the wrong way at every junction. Both maps are the right way round now.
    • ·Drive, walk, ride and fly are one place instead of four loads of the same place. Switching used to fetch the whole town again, for a town already on your screen.
    • ·The car has a proper road under it. In most places it had been resting on whatever stood highest in each square, which in a town is roofs, trees and the tops of parked vans. Nine places got a ground surface of their own, and three had a safety floor sitting above their own street.
    • ·Walk into something between knee and chest height, press jump, and you climb it. Above about chest height it stays a wall, because a capture has nothing in it to grab. Landing is animated now, and X ducks.
    • ·Every way of moving has more than one camera; press C to cycle. Eye level is the one to try first, because these are photographs taken at eye level and until now there was no way to look at one from there.

  39. 2026-08-27 · v2026.08.27

    Every place can be driven, and a phone can finally pick one

    • ·Seven more captures join the squares, so every place on the index can be driven as well as walked. Two months ago the note against the French captures said they were stepped lanes a car had no business in. That was true of the corner each one starts you in, and not true of the capture.
    • ·Each got its own starting point for the car. Flat ground alone picks the lawn, so every candidate was read for colour as well: the best-driving spot in La Sarraz ran forty metres across the chateau grass.
    • ·Three places were being driven on an invisible floor set above the road, level and smooth and never touching the street you could see beneath it.
    • ·The Gstaad car park is the one place you can drive but not walk: a sealed deck with a ramp and no way in on foot.

  40. 2026-08-25 · v2026.08.25

    Two of the squares can be driven

    • ·Aachen Domplatz and Tübingen Marktplatz are drivable, which makes three places you can drive rather than one. Both are open paved squares, which is the shape a car works in; the other captures are stepped medieval lanes and stay on foot.
    • ·Each has its own place for the car to start, separate from where a walker starts. A walker is put where the view is; a car needs flat paving under two metres of body and a clear run in front of it.

  41. 2026-08-24 · v2026.08.24

    Ground, sky and walls for the places that arrived yesterday

    • ·The three new towns have walls for the car, so driving them meets the same walls walking does. Every capture keeps its own sky, held at the exposure the scene was measured at.
    • ·On a phone the map of Europe is a picture and the list underneath is the control. Panning a map with a thumb while trying to scroll the page is a fight nobody wins.
    • ·Controllers work, on the driving demo and in the towns, plus a layout for model transmitters plugged in as a joystick.

  42. 2026-08-23 · v2026.08.23

    Five more places, and a map to find them on

    • ·Aachen, Olsztyn, Tübingen, Lisbon, and an underground car park in Gstaad. The car park is the first place here that offers one way through it and not four: no daylight, no route in on foot, so it is flown or it is not visited.
    • ·The places band is a map of Europe, each capture on its own coordinates instead of in a row, which answers where is this better than a caption does.
    • ·Pause stops the world. It used to stop the controls and leave everything else running behind the menu, which is why a paused tab kept the fans up.

  43. 2026-08-22 · v2026.08.22

    The towns spend their detail where you are looking

    • ·The towns hold the same amount of detail and spend it on what is in front of you, instead of spreading it evenly across a district you are mostly not looking at. In the same street in Aix, the cobbles, the kerb line and the bollards are legible where they used to be a smear.
    • ·That costs frames on a laptop graphics chip, and it is worth naming rather than burying: about 11 a second against 46 on the old path. Performance and Balanced in Settings buy them back. The trade is deliberate, because this is a photography problem before it is a frame rate problem.
    • ·Ludlow Square keeps loading whole, which on that capture is both sharper and faster: it is a small courtyard where everything sits at roughly the same distance, so there is no near and far to tell apart.

  44. 2026-08-20 · v2026.08.20

    The front door opens onto a place you pick

    • ·The home page had a reveal and no way in. The scan of Ludlow resolving into the photograph runs for nearly three screens of scrolling, and for that whole stretch there was nothing you could press. There is a door in the hero now, and it stays lit for the whole reveal.
    • ·Choosing a place and choosing how to move through it used to be two sections that did not cross. They are one now, and every place shows the ways it actually offers: the square shows four and the towns show three. That one missing button is the honest way to say a car cannot get down a stepped medieval lane.
    • ·The page also stopped leading with driving, on a site where four of the five places are walked.

  45. 2026-08-15 · v2026.08.15

    Every machine gets offered the sharpest version first

    • ·Every machine is offered the sharpest version of a capture first, and the frame rate is what argues it down, rather than a guess about your class of hardware ruling it out before it is tried.
    • ·Stepping down needs evidence, not a slow first minute. A capture takes real seconds to arrive on any machine, and the picture used to be judged, and demoted, while it was still arriving.
    • ·If a machine really cannot hold what it was offered, the next visit opens one level lower. That note expires after a month, because a bad afternoon is not a permanent verdict about your computer.

  46. 2026-08-14 · v2026.08.14

    The towns open at their best detail instead of climbing to it

    • ·Walking into a town used to start on the lowest detail and work upward, one step every six seconds, under a ceiling that stopped short of the sharpest file we ship. Most visits never got there. The scene opens at the top now, and the frame rate can only take detail away.
    • ·The first frame arrives sooner, not later: a light version lands first, the cover comes down on that, and the sharp one takes over in place while you are already walking.
    • ·On laptop graphics chips the towns also stopped rendering below the resolution of the screen they are on, which is a softness no amount of detail can undo.

  47. 2026-08-11 · v2026.08.11

    Aix and Lourmarin stop looking like fog

    • ·Two of the four towns rendered as a soft blur no matter what you did, and the reason was arithmetic rather than taste: almost the whole detail budget went on holding the outline of a district, leaving nothing for the street under your feet. No capture can be starved that way again.
    • ·Detail climbs now as well as falls. A machine running comfortably above target had no way to spend the headroom. Measured on an Intel laptop chip, Aix settled at three times the detail it used to, at the same frame rate.
    • ·CINEMATIC in Settings, Display means what it says on the towns: the most detail your hardware is trusted with, held there. The only thing it can cost you is smoothness.

  48. 2026-08-10 · v2026.08.10

    The towns render at your screen’s real resolution

    • ·The streamed towns were drawing fewer pixels than your screen has and letting the browser stretch the result. They render at the density your machine is rated for now.
    • ·The quality preset in Settings does something here. It was wired only to the post-process chain, and these towns deliberately run none of that, so picking a higher setting changed nothing at all.
    • ·Towns start faster, and the loading screen stays up until there is something finished to walk into. Three things used to still be arriving after it lifted, and you could watch all of them: the town assembling around you, the ground appearing underfoot, and your own body turning up a moment later.
    • ·Breaking into a run is a wind-up now rather than a switch, building over about four strides.

  49. 2026-08-09 · v2026.08.09

    You can ride a bicycle through the towns

    • ·The bicycle is rideable, and it is a bicycle rather than a car with two wheels. Speed comes from a rider pushing against gravity, rolling resistance and the air, so it takes a few seconds to get going, runs away from you downhill, dies on a steep enough climb, and rolls backwards if you stop pointing uphill.
    • ·It is not self-balancing, because bicycles are not. Come to a stop and the rider slides forward off the saddle, puts a foot down and leans the machine onto that leg.
    • ·Steering is the arrow keys and only the arrow keys. The bike goes where the front wheel is pointed rather than where the camera is looking, and it leans by the angle that actually balances the turn.

  50. 2026-08-08 · v2026.08.08

    The walked towns stream the way the best splat viewers do

    • ·A town arrives whole and soft now, sharpening where you look, instead of assembling in patches. Turning your head refreshes what you are looking at, which it did not before.
    • ·Standing still costs half the graphics work, and a single input restores everything before you can notice. On a warm laptop that is the difference between idling cool and cooking while parked.
    • ·The walker and the drone no longer wear a flat dark patch across the shoulders, and distant rooftops stop arriving and leaving again as you turn.

  51. 2026-08-07 · v2026.08.07

    The walked towns open to everyone

    • ·Four of the five captured places are walked, not driven, and until today the only way in was an internal test page. /explore is that way in, made public: pick a town, walk it or fly it by drone.
    • ·The cities page shows every place drawn as its own street map, the same maps the game navigates by, with the coordinates under each name.
    • ·Pricing names its lanes: what stays free, what a Pro tier will be for once the library earns it, and licensing a capture of your own place. None of it has a number yet, on purpose.
    • ·The walking HUD lost its boxes. What remains is type floating on the place itself, held legible by a soft corner shade instead of chrome.

  52. 2026-08-06 · v2026.08.06

    The map shows the town, and the walker learns to run and jump

    • ·Keep moving for a few seconds and you break into a run, the way a person with somewhere to be actually does. It is a real gait rather than the walk cycle played fast, which is what it was: knees pumping like a silent film.
    • ·Space jumps, enough to hop a kerb or a low wall, and the drone holds whatever height you left it at as it crosses a valley.
    • ·The map used to draw only the network it was certain you could walk, so driving past the last certified street sailed your marker off the edge into nothing. It covers the whole captured place now.
    • ·Lourmarin had a subtler version of the same lie. The village is terraced, and the map only believed in steps it could climb back up, so everything below a terrace edge was left off it: five sixths of the walkable village.

  53. 2026-08-03 · v2026.08.03

    Standing on the ground, and a map of where you can go

    • ·These towns sit on hillsides, and on foot you were not really standing on them. Underneath every place was a single flat plane set at the height the car needs, and wherever the real street ran below it you walked across the gap instead of down the hill. In La Sarraz that covered a quarter of the place, by as much as six metres.
    • ·The plane is gone. You walk on the captured surface, and the drone can fly down into the lower town rather than stopping at an invisible ceiling. Where a scan has a hole you get put back on the last solid ground you stood on.
    • ·The map is a street map now. It used to trace the outline of the ground you could stand on and fill it in, which can never look like a map: every wobble in the scan became a wobble in the shape, and a three metre lane came out as a wiggly ribbon.

  54. 2026-07-30 · v2026.07.30

    Lourmarin, a village in the Luberon

    • ·A fourth place to drive. The capture runs about two hundred metres of village one way and three hundred the other, with stone going up thirty metres on either side of lanes that mostly leave the car a few metres of room.
    • ·This one came as a single file of 14.8 million splats with no detail levels of its own, so the four the game streams were built here, each thinned down from the one above it.
    • ·It nearly did not drive at all. Two stray triangles left over from the scan were hanging in mid air a metre and a half from where the car starts, low enough to catch the bumper and small enough that every check we had said the ground was clear. Colliders now throw away specks that size.

  55. 2026-07-28 · v2026.07.28

    Three more places you can drive

    • ·La Sarraz, a hilltop town in Vaud. La Filature, the old mill yard next door. And Aix-en-Provence, three kilometres of streets in the historic centre, captured on foot at eye level rather than from the air.
    • ·Each one collides for real. The ground under the car comes from the capture itself, so the road rises and falls where the real one does, and the walls stop you where the real walls are.
    • ·They start pointed down the street. In a medieval lane there is about two metres of room either side of the car, so which way it faces when it lands is the difference between driving away and sitting nose-first in a wall.

  56. 2026-07-11 · v2026.07.11

    A rear-view camera when you back up

    • ·Reversing now works like a real car. From the hood and driver's-seat views, backing up brings a small rear-view screen onto the dashboard showing the road behind you, instead of the whole view swinging around to face the back.
    • ·A new page lays out what this is for: a test-drive on a real street, walking a venue before you fly out or a building before it's built, driving a trip before people book it, and real places dropped into a game.

  57. 2026-06-27 · v2026.06.27

    One scan colliding with another, and smarter street life

    • ·A car that is itself a scan now drives inside a captured place and collides with it for real. Getting one capture to physically push against another, live in a browser, is a hard problem, and it is holding.
    • ·The people in the scene move with a real sense of the place. They read where they can go and what is in the way, and it holds up while they walk, react, and get out of the car's path.
    • ·Looking ahead: we have started research into captures that move rather than hold a single frozen moment. Early days, but it is the path to weather, traffic, and a day that turns.

  58. 2026-06-22 · v2026.06.22

    A new front door, and repeat visits that load instantly

    • ·The landing is now the driver's seat. The page is the windshield, the controls sit on the dashboard, and "Ignite & drive" drops you straight into a real place, with the studio and the coming SDK a click away.
    • ·Repeat visits are near-instant. Come back and you go straight to driving instead of waiting on a fresh load.
    • ·No dead ends: if your browser or phone can't run the live demo yet, you still see the real drive footage, with one tap to be notified when it's ready for you.
    • ·Leaving the demo now takes you back to the home page.

  59. 2026-06-15 · v2026.06.15

    Crisper scenery, cleaner drive

    • ·More detail held on screen at the same framerate.
    • ·Driving polish. The wheels and braking feel right.

  60. 2026-06-13 · v2026.06.13

    Calmer on every machine

    • ·A broad performance and stability pass, smoother on ordinary laptops and built-in graphics, with fewer hitches.
    • ·Effects default off, so the capture's real light comes through. Tone and colour adjustments are opt-in for weaker captures.
    • ·Lighter, faster pages.

  61. 2026-06-11 · v2026.06.11

    Straight to the wheel, nothing pops in

    • ·The path from landing to driving is one tap, no menus in the way.
    • ·The scene finishes loading behind a single welcome card, so it's whole the moment you start. Nothing pops in.
    • ·Cleaner HUD and a tidied Settings panel.

  62. 2026-06-06 · v2026.06.06

    Ludlow has someone walking around

    • ·A pedestrian now walks a route along the Ludlow pavement, glances over and waves when you pull up, and bolts when you drive at it.
    • ·The car physically interacts with it. You can nudge or knock it down, and it picks itself back up.

  63. 2026-06-03 · v2026.06.03

    Your seat, your controls, and a path for phones

    • ·Drives open on the hood camera, from the driver's seat.
    • ·Rebindable controls, plus handling and camera tuning.
    • ·Phones get a proper coming-soon page, and more browsers are supported.

  64. 2026-05-30 · v2026.05.30

    Ludlow drives the way it should

    • ·Walls, kerbs and props stop the car properly, and the ride is smooth.
    • ·The street planter is a real object you can bump and shove around.

  65. 2026-05-28 · v2026.05.28

    The demo, focused on its strongest scene

    • ·Focused the public demo on its strongest scene, Ludlow Square, a drivable city block, with a night aerial flyover as a second, opt-in experience.
    • ·Trimmed the live site down to the demo and its marketing pages.

  66. 2026-05-20 · v2026.05.20

    Streaming that adapts to you

    • ·Scenes adapt to your connection: more detail when the network allows, gracefully less when it doesn't, without stutter.
    • ·Detail is spent where you're actually looking.
    • ·Quality steps up without ever blanking the frame.

  67. 2026-05-19 · v2026.05.19

    Worlds that stream instead of download

    • ·Big scenes now stream in rather than arriving as one large download. The first view comes fast, and the rest fills in as you go.

  68. 2026-05-16 · v2026.05.16

    Sound, feel, and a lot of polish

    • ·A full audio pass: an ambient bed, per-place music, and collision sound that matches the surface you hit.
    • ·Impacts land across senses at once: sound, a screen pulse, and gamepad or phone vibration.
    • ·Photo mode: free-fly camera, framing grid, and one-tap capture.
    • ·A settings drawer for visuals, audio, accessibility, and diagnostics.
    • ·The title screen runs on the live scene.
    • ·Optional ways to play: a combo meter, a photo hunt, and a speed run, all off the critical path.
    • ·Your history persists: a drive log, lifetime stats, a photo gallery, streaks, and achievements.
    • ·Reflections and HDR output, with the car picking up the ambient colour of the place it's in.
    • ·Works offline after the first visit, plus marketing pages and an invite system.

  69. 2026-05-14 · v2026.05.14

    Visual presets, photo mode, settings

    • ·Visual presets for the look of a scene.
    • ·Effects that sell the drive: dust, tyre smoke, brake heat, contact shadows.
    • ·Photo mode, an ambient soundtrack, and the first settings drawer.
    • ·Feel: brake-punch camera, speed lines, G-force tilt, and controller vibration.

  70. 2026-05-13 · v2026.05.13

    Streaming and chase camera

    • ·Streaming, usage insight, and a smooth chase camera came together.
    • ·Reflections, contact shadows, and detail that scales with distance.
    • ·Drive against the real geometry of the place. Walls and surfaces stop the car.

  71. 2026-05-09 · v2026.05.09

    First pixel on built-in graphics

    • ·First photoreal scene rendering live in a browser tab, on built-in graphics, not just a high-end card.
    • ·A compatibility check that guides unsupported browsers instead of failing silently.
    • ·Fast on the first visit, instant after, even offline.