Google Street View works like a time machine

Odjezdu 19 million kilometers on roads around the world, the Google Street View cars since 2007 have collected a huge archive of photos. It would be foolish to remove the old pictures, because with time they acquire historical value. Moreover, you need to make these pictures available for viewing, I decided to Google and developed a "time machine" a separate slider that takes you into the past, showing each picture taken in this place for the past seven years. Feature available in the desktop version of Google Maps, while only a small number of accounts.

The accessibility of "machine time" indicates the clock icon in the upper left corner of the screen. If you see the watch, now you can explore the Grand building, which were conducted in the major cities. For example, freedom Tower in new York city or stadium for world Cup in Fortaleza (Brazil).



"The time machine" shows how the builders to restore the destroyed areas in onagawa chō (Japan) after the earthquake and tsunami in 2011.



There are more mundane uses of the service: for example, see how changing the advertising on billboards or the price of gasoline near the filling stations.

Archival images available in 55 countries. In Germany "time machine" is prohibited by law, despite the fact that prior to publishing algorithms automatically removed from images of faces and car numbers.

Pictures, if possible, reduced to a common and aligned perspective. In the case of Onagawa picture is slightly different, because the earth has moved about 3 meters relative to the GPS coordinates.

For most city types there are 2-3 pictures a different period, but for the centers of large cities, the number of "impressions of time" may be up to 20-30. Unfortunately, for technical reasons, many photographs from the archive failed to lead to a "common denominator", so that even now in the bins Google left a lot of interesting things.

Article based on information from habrahabr.ru