I know what these weird ocean-bound liminal spaces in Google Street View actually are and they're still giving me the creeps

A screenshot of a "liminal space" in Google Street View, showing a shop interior that seems to be located in the middle of the ocean.

(Image credit: Google)

I feel sorry for the Google Street View pin. A dangly little yellow dude, picked up by millions of mouse cursors worldwide and unceremoniously dropped into locations across the planet, only to silently scream the visions it sees from its yellow, deadened eyes. Here is the view of where you seek, it seems to say. Now leave me here, alone and adrift. My purpose is served, and I must make my way home.

Should you happen to drop one of these hapless, pitiful mannequins into the middle of the ocean, however, there's a possibility they might report back something entirely unexpected (via Futurism). That's how certain redditors have been spending their time, and they've found all sorts of surprising results, like this liminal-like commercial interior apparently located along the mid-Atlantic ridge, just north of the Azores.

On Google Maps there is a streetview spot in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, and it's just the bathroom aisle at a hardware store from r/Weird

This looks to be the inside of a hardware store listed as the "Joca Construção", although it's safe to assume that it's not actually located atop the second largest ocean basin of our fair planet.

The listing was created by "Visual Art Brasil", which seems to be a digital marketing agency, so there's a possibility here we're all being fooled by an underground viral marketing campaign for....paint? Ladders? Reasonably priced curtain hooks? I'm still really not sure.

The mystery continues, as Reddit user KillHitlerAgain has also located several other Street View interiors that seem to depict commercial spaces, and like all the best thrillers, there's an obvious pattern. Cue the swelling music, pens falling from researchers mouths, and a slow zoom in on the protagonists visage: They appear to be, wait for it, in a grid.

Comment from r/Weird

That's no moon. Anyway, Futurism did a bit more poking around and found a few more to add to the list, including a Street View of a Polish restaurant in Germany also seemingly located in the Atlantic. It's not just the second largest ocean getting in on the action, either. The mighty South Pacific gets an erroneous entry all of its own, containing what seems to be an auto parts storage facility listing created by Xprasive, another marketing company.

Herein lies a clue. You can submit your own additions to Google's Street View function via Street View Studio, and it seems like these marketing companies may have simply screwed up the geodata and accidentally positioned their clients' businesses in the middle of vast bodies of water—ironically fulfilling their wishes for greater visibility by putting them exactly where they're not, and causing a whole internet kerfuffle as to what these erroneous submissions might mean.

Or it could be intentional, in which case, hats off. Still, Occam's Razor and all that, it looks like this might just be a case of some wonky metadata causing real-life locations to appear to float, Twilight Zone style, above vast bodies of water all over the planet. That, or these businesses really are portals to another dimension, or fragments of another universe poking into ours in all the wrong ways.

Sleep tight, PC gamers. Nothing to see here.

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Andy built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 12, when IDE cables were a thing and high resolution wasn't—and he hasn't stopped since. Now working as a hardware writer for PC Gamer, Andy spends his time jumping around the world attending product launches and trade shows, all the while reviewing every bit of PC gaming hardware he can get his hands on. You name it, if it's interesting hardware he'll write words about it, with opinions and everything.