CREATE Lab

The CREATE Lab will be heading to London on October 25-27 to take part in MozFest 2013. Every year Mozilla brings together webmakers, educators and innovators from around the world who all share the aim to make the web more open and encourage people to become webmakers, not just consumers. CREATE will be showcasing Time Machine and will be focusing on the interactive Google Earth Engine Landsat Timelapse. We'll explore through space and time our changing planet and create and share tours about the last 29 years.

On May 9, 2013, a collaboration between Google, NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and TIME, releases what is possibly the most comprehensive picture of our changing planet ever made available to the public. More than a quarter-century of satellite images of Earth, combined with Google Earth Engine technology, yields for the first time an interactive time-lapse experience of the global changes of the planet we all inhabit, contributing to a global environmental understanding.

Find full article here: https://plus.google.com/117790530324740296539/posts/csjh9CFuws4

image from http://world.time.com/timelapse/

After months of collaboration with Google, and to coincide with yesterday's 40th anniversary of the Landsat program, the Time Machine team is proud to showcase interactive timelapses of the Earth's surface. With them you can travel through time, from 1999-2011, to see the transformation of our planet.

Imagery from two different satellites were used, one from MODIS and the other from Landsat.

Seeing is believing, and with this software (+ accompanying video tours) you can witness with your own eyes the rapid urban growth of areas like the state of Nevada in the US or Duabai in the Middle East, the deforestation of the Amazon in South America, and the drying of the Aral Sea in the Middle East.

GigaPan Time Machine enables simultaneous exploration of space and time across massive datasets that could not previously be interactively explored.

Highlights from Landsat:

The rapid growth of Las Vegas, Nevada between 1999 and 2011 is visible in this Landsat timelapse tour.

Landsat timelapse tour of the Amazon rainforest shows the spread of deforestation between 1999 and 2011.

The drying of the Aral Sea between 1999 and 2011 depicted in this Landsat timelapse tour.

Main site: http://timemachine.gigapan.org/

Paul Dille

This is first followup on the time lapse photography done yesterday.

Randy and others (Anne, Josh, and Dror) were shooting from about 6am to midnight yesterday. Randy said that over 60,000 photographs (at 18 megapixels each) were captured; one every four seconds, on each of four cameras, clicking in unison. The cameras captured sunrise, morning commute, midday traffic, the coming & going of clouds over the city, coal barges going up & down the river, evening commute, sunset, moonrise, drivers & ferry boats streaming toward Heinz Field, and the Steelers game!

It will be days until all of these images are stitched into a zoomable video, but in the meantime, here are some snapshots.

photo album: https://picasaweb.google.com/111415749895648787719/TimeLapseGigapanFromMtWash...

 

Josh & Randy

 

Four Canon T2i's running off a car battery, each camera had a 128 GB memory card.

Randy, 7pm

Randy Sargent is shooting a panoramic zoomable time lapse (aka time lapse gigapan) all day Thursday December 8 from the sidewalk of McArdle Roadway 100 lateral feet from the top

(location is at center of this map)

The panorama will include most of this view (click link)

He plans to be at that location shooting picures every second or two from 5:30am until 11pm!

If you're in the area, you could drop by and say hi. Or if you bike/walk along the Mon Wharf or some other location downtown visible from the top of McArdle Roadway, you'll be in the video! Wear bright colors!

Here's a simple time lapse of the Paddle-at-the-Point event last year, shot with a single camera. Thursday's time lapse will use four cameras shooting in unison.

(I posted this same message to the bike-pgh bboard http://bike-pgh.org/bbpress/topic/appear-in-a-time-lapse-video-of-downtown-on-thu-128#post-90344 to publicize it some).

-Paul