A frame of Timelapse's view of the growth of Las Vegas, Nevada.
This story has been updated with additional information and corrections provided by Google after the interview.
In May, Google unveiled Earth Engine, a set of technologies and services that combine Google's existing global mapping capabilities with decades of historical satellite data from both NASA and the US Geological Survey (USGS). One of the first products emerging from Earth Engine is Timelapse—a Web-based view of changes on the Earth's surface over the past three decades, published in collaboration with Time magazine.
The "Global Timelapse" images are also viewable through the Earth Engine site, which allows you to pan and zoom to any location on the planet and watch 30 years of change, thanks to 66 million streaming video tiles. The result is "an incontrovertible description of what's happened on our planet due to urban growth, climate change, et cetera," said Google Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives Alfred Spector.
- Alfred Spector
- API
- Ars Technica
- Asia
- Baltimore
- Carnegie Mellon
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Carnegie Mellon University's CREATE Lab
- Carnegie Mellon's CREATE Lab .
- China
- climate change
- Computing
- computing
- Earth Engine
- Earth Engine , a set of technologies and services
- educational tool
- final product
- geo-data
- geospatial search capabilities
- Google Chrome
- historical satellite data
- HTML
- Human–computer interaction
- information technology
- Internet search engines
- Japan
- Keyhole Markup Language
- Landsat
- Maryland
- Microsoft
- Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer
- MODIS
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- network systems integrator
- Nexus
- potential applications
- Randy Sargent
- retail console games
- satellite data
- Scientific Method
- Sean Gallagher
- Software
- storage infrastructure
- streaming video
- Technology
- Technology Lab
- Technology Lab
- United States
- US Geological Survey
- web browser
- Web-based view
- World Wide Web
