Jerome said that he comes from a big family. He then clicks on it to show his late grandmother, holding shopping bags and an umbrella as she waited to cross the road. Scrolling through past Street View collections of the same traffic crossing over the years, he stops at a thumbnail labelled “Feb 2009”. He told TODAY that he was overwhelmed by the responses to his video, which is a screen recording of the Google Maps mobile application on his smartphone, displaying a Google Street View of a traffic light crossing at 840 Hougang Central.
"I asked if she remembered seeing any car with a huge camera but she couldn't remember, haha," he said, referring to the cars used to capture the Street View imagery. When he showed it to her at the time, she was surprised and asked how he had gotten the picture. He then got the idea of looking around places that his family members would frequent and came across this snapshot of his grandmother. Jerome, who did not want to disclose his profession, said that it was around 2017 that he first became curious about how his parents' car had changed through the years and began to use Google Street View's archival function to observe its progression. He told TODAY: "For some reason, I feel that photo albums freeze the moment, but seeing her on Google Maps somehow felt like she was standing there in real life." In a reply on TikTok, he said that the family does have photos and videos of her but seeing her on Google Maps somehow felt different. The obvious question is why Jerome does not just look at an old photograph of his grandmother, something a user also asked. The post resonated with TikTok viewers so much that they then talked about missing their departed loved ones and even places in Singapore that are gone, such as their schools. The Chinese New Year season, when people often visit or pay their respects to older relatives, can heighten the absence of those who are no longer around. "That was our Saturday morning affair," he recalled fondly. Going by the username "retroridersg" on TikTok and giving his name as just "Jerome" when contacted by TODAY on Thursday (Feb 2), the 37-year-old said that his grandmother was on one of her daily grocery runs at the time and it reminded him of when he was young and "helping her carry the groceries". "Every Chinese New Year whenever I miss my late grandma, I come to Google Maps and she will be there," he wrote in his video caption. SINGAPORE - A Singaporean TikTok user who missed his late grandmother during Chinese New Year decided to share a video on how he uses Google Maps to look at an image that the search engine captured of her when she was still alive, waiting at a traffic crossing in Hougang.
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