Carnegie Mellon Researchers Build 'GigaPan Time Machine'

At the Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute engineers have developed computer browser technology to create the ‘GigaPan Time Machine’. This allows viewers to see large, panoramic, high resolution image sequences and videos by zooming in and out of the photographs. The viewer can also simultaneously move back and forth in time.

For instance one GigaPan Time Machine video shows a garden where seeds are planted till they are in full bloom. As you view the video you can see the full garden grow or zoom in on particular plants. You can even see the caterpillars and stink -bugs that eat the leaves of stems of individual plants. Similarly you can see beehives being developed; roads, buildings or bridges being constructed; or festivals or protests as they unfold.

The photos that form the GigaPan Time Machine video are taken at intervals of 15 minutes. The images are of millions of pixels resolution. This allows great details to be recorded in the photographs. The photos are taken by the GigaPan camera which is operated from a robotic platform and processed by CMU computers.

The system is an extension of the GigaPan technology developed by the CREATE Lab and NASA. To get the time dimension in the panoramic frames the images are clicked repeatedly and then stitched together in both space and time to create the video. The time machine currently operates only with Google's Chrome or Apple's Safari browsers. Once a Time Machine GigaPan has been created, viewers can annotate and save their explorations of it in the form of video "Time Warps."