A Timelapse Video Constructed From Online Photographs

The University of Washington and Google have teamed up to create incredibly impressive timelapse videos of popular tourist locations using pictures pulled from the Internet. 

The team first collected a whopping 86 million photos and organized them by location and vantage point. They were then sorted in order of date; next, the viewpoints were warped to match, and the colors were altered to create consistency and reduce flicker. The result is several videos of different places growing, changing, or diminishing—some have a simple "seasonal rhythm," like the timelapse shots of Lombard Street in San Francisco, while others show geological changes, like at a hot spring in Yellowstone National Park. They even compiled videos of major building renovations, like at the Basilica St. Maria of Salute in Venice and Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany. The team explained their process in a paper and will soon release the code they used to create it. 

[h/t: LaughingSquid.com]