'Time-Lapsing' – Incredible, Evocative Photography through Involuntary Crowdsourcing
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| macitynet.it |
Imagine a library so impossibly comprehensive and detailed
that even if you spent a hundred lifetimes sifting through it, you would still
have barely even scratched the surface. Now, imagine that this library is an ungodly
mess, utterly disorganized, inconsistent and with virtually no guiding pattern
of any kind. Congratulations, you just imagined the internet.
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| theverge.com |
It’s interesting to wonder about just how much amazing
information could be gleaned by going through the impossibly massive archives
of data present online if one was in the right mind-set. Well thanks to
researchers from Google and the University of Washington, we have a new,
amazing example of what can be achieved. Employing a brand new set of muscular
algorithms, the researchers have been able to mine millions of photographs from
across the web, from Flickr to Facebook, and compiled them into stunning,
fascinating time-lapses which show how the world has physically changed in the
past decade. Here’s how they describe it in the official research paper:
“We introduce an approach for synthesizing time-lapse videos of popular landmarks from large community photo collections. The approach is completely automated and leverages the vast quantity of photos available online. First, we cluster 86 million photos into landmarks and popular viewpoints. Then, we sort the photos by date and warp each photo onto a common viewpoint. Finally, we stabilize the appearance of the sequence to compensate for lighting effects and minimize flicker. Our resulting time-lapses show diverse changes in the world's most popular sites, like glaciers shrinking, skyscrapers being constructed, and waterfalls changing course.”
All the clusters are created with a tangled hodge-podge of differently sourced images from research material to holiday snaps to discarded cameras, the challenge comes with conditioning all the thousands of stills into one consistent lapse. The effect achieved by this process varies, some of the
lapses are indicative of how far we’ve come industrially, showing how
skyscrapers can suddenly completely change a skyline, whilst others are more
stern environmental messages, showing clear evidence of polar ice reduction and
rising water levels. Mainly though, this project aptly demonstrates the power
of the internet as a kind of accidental or involuntary archive, vital
historical documentation just happens there without even trying, particularly
with the advent of social media and with the right tools it can be repurposed
in various useful ways.
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| theverge.com |
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| theverge.com |
This is still in the very early stages and the team are
putting more clusters together even as we speak, but the potential for
awareness campaigning, geographical study and many other things is absolutely
massive and it extends far beyond that. Facebook is basically a huge genealogy
capsule waiting to happen and even Twitter, sifted through in the right way,
could provide a really interesting reflection of public response to particular
historical milestones.
Callum Davies
Callum is a film school graduate who is now making a name for himself as a journalist and content writer. His vices include flat whites and 90s hip-hop. Follow him @CallumAtSMF
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'Time-Lapsing' – Incredible, Evocative Photography through Involuntary Crowdsourcing
Reviewed by Unknown
on
Saturday, May 23, 2015
Rating:
Reviewed by Unknown
on
Saturday, May 23, 2015
Rating:
Unknown
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