- One couple from Singapore, a few months ago filled with their coronavirus quarantine, decided to get creative and launch a website that satisfies the wanderer in all of us because most of us are not able to travel at the moment.
- The result was “WindowSwap”, a site that presents visitors with video clips of what you see when they look out the windows at public houses around the world.
- The entries came everywhere from Giza to Brooklyn, and so many points in between.
About two months ago, during what they describe as the most severe part of the quarantine virus quarantine in Singapore, Sonali Ranjit and Vaishnav Balasubramaniam began to calm down and feel ‘a little antsy’ in the couple’s one-bedroom apartment.
One day scrolling through her Instagram feed, she spied on a message from a friend who lives in Barcelona. He had shared a picture of the view from his window, and was looking out at the northeastern Spanish city he calls home. “I remember he complained that he was bored of it – he was of course also under lockdown – but it looked incredible to us,” Ranjit told BGR via BGR. ‘We were joking about how we wished we could just swap places with him … when we came up with the idea. If we could not switch places, then maybe we could switch window views. And please that we were somewhere else for a while. ”
Like the pretense for a while somewhere else, the motivation behind “WindowSwap,” was a website that these two creatives, along with freelance developer Maryam Touimi Benjelloun, decided to launch back in June. The idea is for people around the world to shoot 10 minute video clips from the perspective of searching through a window in their house or apartment, and submit these to the couple’s site. So far, hundreds of people around the world have done this (all you have to do is email a horizontal, HD video covering your window and frame to [email protected]), and the results are welcome escape, however briefly, from the feeling of home, wherever you are in the world.
The best way to enjoy the site is, in my opinion, on a large, expanding computer screen. And make sure your sound is turned on. As you cycle through the respective video channels, you may feel a little bit of relief to yourself. You will have people carrying the groceries in the street. Cars splash through. A cat nestled next to a typewriter in the warm glow of the sun. “That’s what it’s like to live in British Columbia, Canada,” I find myself musing, staring out of “Kaslow’s Window” (they are all named after the submitter) at the sublime view of a lake with trees and hills everywhere. This one from Giza especially blew me away:
I tap on the button at the bottom of the screen to navigate to the next “window”, and I’m greeted with “Taylor’s Window”, which looks out over an intersection in Brooklyn. You see cyclists, pedestrians, cars driving through shops, and it’s all so boring and so beautiful at the same time, because the one thing you do not see is looking through these submitted window views? There is no sign of the coronavirus pandemic that killed more than 719,000 people last Friday, according to Johns Hopkins University. These are just boring signs of normal life, something that, if left unchecked, can be annoying to shake your coronavirus-induced malaise, even for just a few moments to remind yourself that life is indeed going on.
The couple told me that they have received more than 3,000 submissions since the launch of the “WindowSwap” site. “People like it for a variety of reasons,” Ranjit said. ‘It calms her, as if giving her a feeling (of) peace when it satisfies her inner voyeur. Some mentioned that it helps with their homeliness. Others say (it) helps to make up for their canceled travel plans.
“We are so happy to have touched so many people around the world.”
All I know is – Adam, from wherever you are in Derbyshire in the East Midlands of England (according to the ID of that particular window view above), I hope you do us all a solid and upload more of your window views, with more of that buoyant English countryside. It is like this American in quarantine, like full paradise on Earth.
Andy is a reporter in Memphis who also contributes to outlets such as Fast Company and The Guardian. If he does not write about technology, he can be found protective about his growing vinyl collection, as well as his Whovianism nursing and binge on a variety of TV shows that you probably will not like.
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