This image shows what the Howard Theater in
Washington looked like in July 2009, left, and after renovation in May
2012, right. (AP Photo/Google) Photograph: Uncredited/AP
Google has turned its Google Maps Street View into a time machine to
let users travel back in time and see how places have changed.
The
new feature will let users track changes in landscape, buildings, roads
and entire neighbourhoods from around the world since the Street View
mapping program began in 2007.
Users can now click on a new clock
icon that will appear in the corner of the screen when using Street View
on Google Maps on a desktop or laptop computer, firing up
scrollbar-controlled time machine, changing the year and even season of
the area or building they are currently looking at to see how it has
changed over time.
'A time traveller like Doc Brown'
"If
you've ever dreamt of being a time traveller like Doc Brown, now's your
chance," said Google Street View product manager Vinay Shet in a blog
post. "We've gathered historical imagery from past Street View
collections dating back to 2007 to create this digital time capsule of
the world." This image shows what a building in
Singapore looked like in October 2008, upper left, against a more recent
photo. (AP Photo/Google) Photograph: Uncredited/AP
Google's Street View uses car-mounted cameras to capture
street-level photos of the world, stitching the images together into a
virtual representation of the real world overlaid on Google's maps.
Google's cars have driven across most of the world, but this is the
first time the search giant has made more than one version of the
resulting images available to the public.
"Now with Street View,
you can see a landmark's growth from the ground up, like the Freedom
Tower in New York city or the 2014 World Cup stadium in Fortaleza,
Brazil," said Shet.
'A digital timeline of recent history'
"This
new feature can also serve as a digital timeline of recent history,
like the reconstruction after the devastating 2011 earthquake and
tsunami in Onagawa, Japan. You can even experience different seasons and
see what it would be like to cruise Italian roadways in both summer and
winter," he said.
Street View has primarily been used as a way of
visualising directions to help users find and identify locations they
are looking for, but the service has become increasingly popular among
"armchair explorers", who have used Street View to discover far away
parts of the world without ever leaving home. This image shows what a neighborhood in
Japan looked like in July 2008, left, and in August 2011, after a major
earthquake hit, right. (AP Photo/Google) Photograph: Uncredited/AP
Google has been adding tourism and beauty hotspots to the service for some time, as well as the insides of some public places like train stations, airports and brick and mortar stores allowing users to view the inside of buildings too.
Google
recently announced that it was to begin using a new algorithm that can
read the house numbers in images on the service, and then correlate
these with real addresses in order to improve the accuracy of addresses
supplied in Google searches. • Google Russia claims Crimea for the federation, while Google Ukraine shows its independence
Google地圖今天開始為街景圖提供時光機器功能。（圖擷取自WSJDigitalNetwork YouTube）
2014-04-24 09:53
〔本報訊〕身邊的一草一木改變了多少，你還記得嗎？谷歌（Google）今天替街景地圖服務新增時間軸「時光機器（Time Machine）」按鈕，讓網友能追溯過去7年Google所蒐集的街景圖，該功能正在陸續推出，暫時只能在PC電腦上使用。
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