‘Drive & Listen’ app takes you on a virtual car ride through cities around the world

Most of us haven’t traveled much in the past year, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. So it’s been a while since we’ve had the enjoyable experience of driving or driving in a car through another city, taking in the sights and the sounds. If you miss that experience, check out “Drive & Listen”, an app that creates a virtual fax message in 53 cities around the world.

For each city, viewers can choose to listen to their choice from a number of different local radio stations, with or without the accompaniment of street noise. These are the ‘Listen’ components of ‘Drive & Listen’.

The app was created by Erkam Seker, a Turkish graduate student studying in Munich. Seker was homesick for Istanbul, which led to the creation of this app last spring.

“I missed driving through my city, even the traffic and hustle and bustle of everyday life, so I watched videos from Istanbul,” Seker said in an interview with Lonely Planet. “It was so nice to see my city, but I thought, why not listen to a radio in the background to get the whole driving experience in cars?”

However, he soon realized that in addition to a cure for homesickness, there was also an opportunity to appease people’s currently hindered wanderlust. The videos are dashcam images uploaded to YouTube and the city list has expanded to include New York, Paris, San Francisco, Seoul, Amsterdam and many more.

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