FutureGuessr

Thanks to Joshua Peake for the tipoff to this website on LinkedIn.

This is produced in France.

What if no landscape on Earth was recognisable anymore? 

Inspired by popular geography games like GeoGuessr (65 million players worldwide) and OpenGuessr, FutureGuessr adopts similar mechanics: the player is dropped somewhere in the world in a 360° environment and must guess their location. 

But here, it’s no longer today’s world. 

The landscapes reflect a future where global warming reaches or exceeds +2.7°C by 2100, according to intermediate to high IPCC scenarios. This future, transformed by the consequences of climate change, remains possible if policy efforts fail to drastically and rapidly reduce human-generated greenhouse gas emissions.

More details here.

Submerged islands in the Maldives, the Amazon turned into savannah, Antarctica adrift, or the disappearance of the Mer de Glace. 

The transformation of each ecosystem was modeled using scientific data from the latest IPCC reports. This data is translated into textual prompts that generate visual projections, respecting real-world topography through AI developed specifically for this project. To limit the carbon footprint, the AI is hosted locally. This approach makes often complex developments visible by projecting them into realistic and often disturbing landscapes.

Climatologist Benjamin Sultan, contributing author of the IPCC’s 6th report and research director at IRD, supported the project and validated its scientific approach. 

Thanks to him, each generated landscape is based on a rigorous documentary foundation, transformed into a visual narrative.

“FutureGuessr skilfully illustrates the upheavals caused by climate change in a playful way while showing that another future is possible.” 

Benjamin Sultan, research director at IRD, climatologist, and IPCC expert