Friday Eye Candy: 'Time-Lapse Mining' Reveals a Changing Planet

Someone's done the hard work of finding, sorting, and stitching together millions of photos from the Internet to create animated portraits of the evolution of places.

May 22, 2015, 9am PDT | James Brasuell | @CasualBrasuell

James Vincent reports on a new project from researchers at Google and the University of Washington that animates places around the world by crowd sourcing publicly available images. Vincent explains:

"Researchers from Google and the University of Washington have found a way though, creating a powerful set of algorithms that automatically sorts millions of online photos into time-lapses of everything from skyscrapers to glaciers. The internet is plugged in at one end, and a record of our changing world comes out the other." They call it 'time-lapse mining.'"

The work allowed the team to create thousands of time-lapses of the most popular places on Earth—everything ranging from the Las Vegas Strip to the Briksdalsbreen Glacier in Norway, which you can see in the video below.

A paper documenting the work and more info is available at the project website.