gemini://pennywhether.xyz/articles/walking

Over the last few years, I’ve become mildly obsessed with what I refer to as “Walk Videos” on YouTube. Basically, all they are is a person going for a walk around a given neighborhood with their camera pointed straight ahead without uttering a word. They’re simply a window into the area that they are filming in. These started very simple with people using their phones, trying their best not to bounce around too much. Now, some of the more popular channels have fairly high-end cameras with wind socks on their mics and then everything attached to a stabilizer so that the image remains steady.

What is so appealing to me about these videos is that they just show the area with no one talking. Prior to these, videos showing this or that city around the world were super try-hard. There would be annoying music, questionable edits, and, invariably, some nauseatingly perky 20 something hosting the show. For me, I just wanted to see various parts of Tokyo. I’ve been there before and don’t need someone to tell me about it.

Even people who haven’t been there will probably get all the info they need about this or that Tokyo neighborhood from a single video with narrator. They all cover basically the same stuff. After that, I just want videos that soak up the ambience of these places uninterrupted. A massive city like Tokyo will have tons of videos on a slew of different areas, all with just silence and a person walking around filming it. There’s a lot going on there, so lots of opportunity to create these videos. That being said, they aren't exactly high-effort videos.

However, it would appear that these things have caught on. Five years ago, there were only a handful of channels doing this. Now there are dozens. There are even people having a wander in other major Japanese cities. Mileage varies depending where one searches, but there’s usually something be it in Osaka, Nagasaki, Fukuoka, Hokkaido, or other large metropolitan areas. It would also appear that people in other countries have noticed how popular the Japan walking videos are, as I’m finding more and more videos of this sort for major cities in Europe and America.

Quite a lot of these videos have thousands of views with particularly popular ones being in the hundreds of thousands and sometimes in the millions. The comment sections are generally surprisingly positive, especially considering this is YouTube where community interaction can turn into something that crawled out of a sewer right quick. So, clearly these walking videos have struck a chord with people.

I think part of it is that these videos provide a sort of virtual tourism. Travelling overseas is a pricey proposition for some people, so these videos make for a nice alternative. People can sort of insert themselves in them and get a feel for a neighborhood on their own. The only curation these videos receive is the route that person filming them chose to walk. No one’s face is taking up 75% of the screen talking about stuff constantly. There’s no music overlaid on half the video. There are no sudden edits the second something interesting shows up on the periphery of the screen. It really does feel like going for a walk in one of these cities. So, for those who may not have the opportunity to visit these places themselves, they at least get somewhat of an unedited taste of them.

Then there are the people like myself who may have visited some of these places. I certainly want to go again to many of them as I really enjoyed it there. Nowadays, with COVID happening, that really isn’t an option for the foreseeable future. Maybe in a year or so when, hopefully, the world is vaccinated, and we’re on the road back to some sense of normalcy. For now, though, I have to content myself with watching these walking videos, and they do scratch an itch to an extent. Judging by some of the comments I’ve read, I’m not alone.

I actually kind of hope at some point something similar can be done in VR. It will likely be many years away before it will happen without needing an eye-wateringly expensive computer, but it would be cool to have some sort of virtual tourism for people who want to sort of hop into another city for an hour. These videos feel like the tip of the iceberg for this sort of thing, and as technology improves, we could see even better options. For now, though, I’m very happy with them. They’re something I wasn’t sure would catch on, but it looks like they really have, and that’s great.