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For nearly two decades, Google has allowed users to get a first-person view of any given intersection — and even the insides of businesses — with its Street View feature.
It's a convenient way to get an early glimpse of where you're going, or even virtually explore some of the most remote parts of the world.
The feature's 360-degree cameras also sometimes produce delightful surprises, from a group of pigeon-masked strangers posing for the camera in Japan to a reindeer running down a country road in northern Norway.
And now, as spotted by Redditors, the feature appears to be populating ghostly, liminal-looking commercial interiors in the middle of the ocean — like this Street View of a bathroom aisle in what appears to be a Brazilian hardware store, mysteriously transported to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
The same user, who goes by the handle KillHitlerAgain, found well over a dozen other Street View interiors of obscure stores — including numerous aisles of that same hardware store — dotting the ocean in a suspiciously grid-like pattern.
We were easily able to confirm the Reddit user's findings. By dragging the little yellow figure Google uses to denote Street View to several hundred miles east off the coast of St. John's, Newfoundland, we could easily jump to a 360-degree view of the inside of a hardware store listed as "Joca Construção."
Many of the coordinates for the otherworldly outlets run along the same latitudes and longitudes, suggesting somebody either intentionally or unintentionally tampered with the data.
The 360-degree view of the hardware store's bathroom aisle was created by a Google account called "Visual Art Brasil," which according to an Instagram profile of the same name is a digital marketing agency.
In a Facebook post, the company advises its clients on optimizing their Google Business Profiles, which help businesses get listed on Google's search engine and appear on Google Maps.
But for now, it's a genuine internet mystery: the haunted-looking and deserted interiors of retail establishments, showing up in the frigid waters of the sea — a browsing experience that evokes modern myths of Backrooms far more than the clean corporate luster of Google Maps.
Zooming in hundreds of miles off the southern coast of Iceland, for instance, shows a different aisle of what appears to be the same Brazilian hardware store.
And hundreds of miles east of the coast of Greenland, you can find a Street View of the store's paint aisle.
And in the waters between Iceland and Greenland, you can find an aisle for paint brushes and rollers.
The hardware store didn't even limit itself to the Atlantic Ocean. In the middle of Hudson Bay, well over a hundred miles off the coast of northern Canada, you can find the store's tile section. And deep in the Pacific, halfway between Hawaii and the California coast, you can browse its bathroom sink section.
Joca Construção isn't the only business perplexingly transported to the middle of the ocean. Poking around the Atlantic, we came across the Street View of a Polish restaurant in Germany and a German car dealer.
Another Street View in the middle of the South Pacific shows what appear to be piles of spare auto parts in a garage, a 360-degree view created by a marketing company called Xprasive.
Google allows users to publish 360-degree imagery using a tool called "Street View Studio." There's a good chance you've come across other user-submitted views on Google Maps, showing the inside of a store or the view overlooking a waterfall.
"Data about your location is used to geotag and position your recording on the map," reads a Google Street View explainer. "Most 360 cameras add metadata and GPS data to your video file."
Could firms like Visual Art Brasil have manipulated this metadata to get its client visibility in the middle of the ocean? Was it with the intention of getting the store more visibility by tinkering with Google's search algorithms and Google Business listings — or was it the result of plain old human error? We've reached out to the company, as well as Xprasive and Google, for clarification.
Regardless of the explanation, it's not every day that you come across a haunted-looking aisle of an empty hardware store in the watery expanse of the Atlantic.
But that hasn't stopped netizens from having a bit of fun.
"Bed, bath, and beyond," one Reddit user mused.
"Way, way, beyond," another user added.
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