QUANTA

Monday, April 25, 2011


‘Time machine’ allows visual exploration of space and time

April 25, 2011 

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute have leveraged the latest browser technology to create GigaPan Time Machine.

The system enables viewers to explore gigapixel-scale, high-resolution videos and image sequences by panning or zooming in and out of the images while simultaneously moving back and forth through time.

Viewers, for instance, can use the system to watch some plants move wildly as they grow while others get eaten by caterpillars, or view a computer simulation of the early universe as gravity works across 600 million light-years to condense matter into filaments and finally into stars that can be seen by zooming in for a closeup.

The system is an extension of the GigaPan technology developed by the CREATE Lab and NASA, which can capture a mosaic of thousands of digital pictures and stitch those frames into a panorama that be interactively explored via computer. To extend GigaPan into the time dimension, image mosaics are repeatedly captured at set intervals, and then stitched across both space and time to create a video in which each frame can be hundreds of millions, or even billions of pixels.

Using HTML5, CREATE Lab computer scientists have developed algorithms and software architecture that make it possible to shift seamlessly from one video portion to another as viewers zoom in and out of Time Machine imagery. To keep bandwidth manageable, the GigaPan site streams only those video fragments that pertain to the segment and/or time frame being viewed.

Source: http://goo.gl/G5QbZ

Source and/or and/or additional resources read more: http://3.ly/rECc  Publisher and/or Author and/or Managing Editor:__Andres Agostini ─ @Futuretronium at Twitter! Futuretronium Book at http://3.ly/rECc