Extra Credit Blog 2 – Google maps ‘Time Machine’

freedom-tower-newEver wish you could travel back in time? Google, being an innovator of the internet, has just recently announced their new product integrating with their Maps application. Google has started what they call Time Machine, an application through Maps that will allow the user from today on to view past snapshots of cities and areas around the

Click the picture above for an example of this product

world. The project is a different way of instantly looking at a city or town’s evolution: it’s one thing to hear about the rise of the Williamsburg waterfront or Freedom Tower, but it’s another to see an instant, on-demand before-and-after(1).

Google was inspired by the users of Maps asking for the availability of older images. Users want to see how their old neighborhood looked years ago, the building of iconic landmarks, or cities before and after natural disasters.“For the longest time we’ve had Street View users asking that we either preserve the imagery we had or that we give them the ability to go back in time and look at imagery the way it was before,” said Luc Vincent, the Google Maps Street View director of engineering(2). Luc Vincent later stated, “We like to think we were building a 3-D image of the world, and now the mirror is actually 4-D…You can go back in time (aka, the fourth dimension), look at things the way they were, and sort of get lost in exploration.” This new ‘Time Machine’ is something every person dreamed of doing as a child, being able to look at your favorite things back in time.

The hope, he said, is that users will find the old Street View maps just as useful as the new photos. “This is something educators and scientists could use,” Vincent said. “We want this to be a resource for the world. That’s why we were intent on launching it worldwide all at once(2)”. Google is revolutionizing the world one step at a time and with this new application allowing users to look back in time? Wow that is one incredible step taken into the future of this world.

 

 

 

 

1 – http://www.popsci.com/article/gadgets/starting-today-google-maps-time-machine?dom=PSC&loc=recent&lnk=4&con=starting-today-google-maps-is-a-time-machine

2 – http://blogs.wsj.com/personal-technology/2014/04/23/google-maps-time-machine-lets-you-stroll-the-streets-of-the-past/

One thought on “Extra Credit Blog 2 – Google maps ‘Time Machine’

Leave a Reply