Well, its not literally a time machine, but sure is a pretty cool and smart application that brings visual interactivity using HTML 5 and modern browser technology.
Google got together with researchers in Carnegie Mellon University's Robotic Institute who have created a technology that lets you zoom in and out through time and space in high-resolution. "Each Time Machine on this page captures a process in extreme detail over space and time, with billions of pixels of explorable resolution." describes GigaPan's homepage.
Here's how Rachel Durfee from Google's Blog team describes this fascinating technology:
"The sophisticated camera the GigaPan team uses for their photographs capture hundreds or even thousands of digital pictures and stitch them together to form an interactive panorama. With Time Machine, the cameras capture these image mosaics at regular intervals to create a video with hundreds of millions or even billions of pixels in each frame. The result is a video that viewers have the ability to zoom in on while it's playing and see incredible detail."
For suppose, you capture a music festival of about 2 days by constantly taking pictures in regular intervals. Now using GigaPan you can view each and every detail of that festival very very closely. You can see the words on the t-shirt of the lead singer, you can check out intricate details of that massive stage, you can see those chics making funny faces in the front row, you can check out and learn those killer tricks by the drummer and heck, you can even see that grin on the guard's face.
One of Google's example is a video of a growing plant called Brassica Rapa, a plant that is often used for research purpose in classrooms since it can grow rapidly in a small space under a florescent light. A photograph was taken every 15 minutes for 26 days.
Through GigaPan, the timelapse lets you view the movements of the plants as they grow, not only can you observe the growing process of the plant but also closely view (in high resolution) how a tiny caterpillar eats away the leaves and flowers.
An interesting feature is Time Wrap that lets you zoom in and out in to space and time through specific links that you can create in the summary of your project. "You can create time wraps to illustrate and emphasize interesting or important events in the timelapse. Time wraps can go forward or backward in time (or both!), and can have textual annotations to describe what is happening at that point in time and space." they explain. You too can give a try and create your own time wrap(s).
Here's a video demonstrating everything you need to know about GigaPan:
Pushing browser technology to its limits, Google boosts about Chrome's speed and "stability to render the content smoothly as videos start and stop dynamically" that works beautifully with HTML's video tagging feature. Not too long ago, Microsoft also tried to boost its latest Internet Explorer 9 through World's biggest pacman.
You must take GigaPan for a spin, who knows you might observe and discover. :)
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Very interesting but the 'Time Machine' part is really exaggerated.