Google may have grown increasingly corporate over the years, but I love the fact that it still sets out to do cool things just because it can. Working with the University of Washington, the team found a way to create fully automated timelapse photos of both landscapes and cityscapes using photos pulled in from popular photo-sharing sites like Yahoo’s Flickr and its own Picasa.
First, we cluster 86 million photos into landmarks and popular viewpoints. Then, we sort the photos by date and warp each photo onto a common viewpoint. Finally, we stabilize the appearance of the sequence to compensate for lighting effects and minimize flicker.
The team says that the results are not just fun to watch, but also serve a useful purpose … expand full story
