Google Street View works as a time machine

Departure of 19 million kilometers on the roads of the world, Google Street View cars from 2007 collected a huge archive of photos. It would be foolish to delete old snapshots, because over time they acquire historical value. Moreover, the need to make these photographs available for viewing, Google has decided and разработала "The Time Machine» - separate slider that takes you into the past, showing each picture taken in this place for the past seven years. The function is available in the desktop version of Google Maps, so far only a small number of accounts.

The availability of "time machine" indicates the clock icon in the upper left corner of the screen. If you see the clock, you can now explore the grandiose construction projects, which were conducted in the major cities. For example, Tower liberty in New York or stadium for the football World Cup in Fortaleza (Brazil).



"Time Machine" shows how the builders to rebuild destroyed areas in Onagawa (Japan) after the earthquake and tsunami in 2011.



There are also more mundane uses of the service: for example, see how the ads on billboards or gasoline prices near gas stations.

Archived images are available in 55 countries. In Germany, the "time machine" is prohibited by law, despite the fact that before the publication of algorithms automatically removed from photos of the face and car numbers.

Photographs, if possible, reduced to a common perspective and aligned. In the case of Onagawa little pictures are not the same, because the earth moved about 3 meters with respect to the coordinates of GPS.

For most urban species have 2-3 pictures of different times, but for the centers of large cities the number of "impressions of time" can go up to 20-30. Unfortunately, for technical reasons, many photos from the archive failed to lead to a "common denominator", so that even now, in the bins Google left a lot of interesting things.

Source: habrahabr.ru/post/220597/