Back to the future with Google's video 'time machine'

Add to My Stories It may not be quite as exciting as a flying Delorean.But Google has nevertheless claimed to have created a 'time machine' in the shape of a web application that allows users to zoom into the minutest detail in the high-resolution time-lapse video.Its creators said it allows users to travel through both space and time by moving the camera angle while the time lapse video plays and zoom in and out of specific sections.

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Starting point: the time-lapse video of the pot plants begins when they are seedlings. In this shot the user is zoomed out
For example one video created by scientists at the Carnegie Mellon University, supported by Google, shows pot plants growing from seedling to their full bloom.

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It was created by taking a mosaic of hundreds of photos of the plantsevery 15 minutes using a robotic tripod that rotates the camera to capture every detail of the plants.
The process continued for 26 days, before each mosaic of images was stitched together and then linked to the next set of images in the sequence to create a video that can be zoomed in to the tiniest detail.

Zooming in space and time: As the video plays, the user can zoom into the tiniest detail because each frame is composed from a mosaic of hundred so of photos

'Explore in amazing ways': The scientists behind the project say it gives users new ways to analyse data
Illah Nourbakhsh, associate professor of robotics and he! ad of th e CREATE Lab, said: 'With GigaPan Time Machine, you can simultaneously explore space and time at extremely high resolutions,'
'Science has always been about narrowing your point of view - selecting a particular experiment or observation that you think might provide insight.
'But this system enables what we call exhaustive science, capturing huge amounts of data that can then be explored in amazing ways.' The team at the American university had already pioneered the robotic tripods and computer graphic technology to make such images possible.
But they say web breakthroughs using HTML5 have now allowed them to display such a complicated application within a web browser.