A Matter Of Degree

Time Travel V1, and how we can all contribute to the effort

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA; TRAFFIC. STOP AND GO SIGNS - 1913 - Harris & Ewing,, photographer, from the LOC on Flickr

 

Whenever the "which superpower would you choose?" question comes up, I pick time travel.  I often wish I could visit places as they were in the past - e.g. my own street, the town where I live, the places where my family members grew up, and sites where I'm traveling as a tourist.  It would be so amazing to flip through different time periods for a single site - like Rod Taylor when he's sitting in his time machine.  

Today I learned that there is a team at Google working on this concept, with the goal of delivering a day-in-the-life time-travel experience through AR.

They've just released phase one, a browser-based toolset called rǝ (pronounced as re”turn"), an open source, scalable system running on Google Cloud and Kubernetes that can reconstruct cities from historical maps and photos.  

The great news is that the system is open to all.  Got maps or old photos and need a COVID project?  Here are some things we all can do to contribute to this effort:

• upload historical maps
• georectify/warp maps that are already in the system
• trace georectified maps (e.g. drawing a building footprint, entering/correcting textual information such as its address, number of floors and so on) – or do this without having an underlying map
• upload and annotate images with buildings in them
• spread the word about the project

The complete suite of crowdsourcing tools is available online today to anyone in the world to go in and make a contribution, however large or small, to the project.  The more information and images we can gather about a place, the better the reconstruction will be, and the better experience we'll be able to have as we stroll down the streets of a city or beloved hometown in the past.

 

The team is also seeking partnership with institutions (libraries, archives, museums) that would have relevant materials and/or shared interests.

 

Read the official announcement about the project

Learn about how to contribute to the project

Thank You, Microsoft

 

It's hard for me to believe, but after five years and five months with Microsoft, I'm starting a new chapter today.

I wanted to take this time and space to say Thank You, Microsoft, for so many things.  Here are just a few of the ways you influenced my life and career for the better.  Thank you - 

• For giving me the opportunity to meet with so many different global companies, to learn about their businesses, and to work to solve their challenges.  I learned so much through my conversations with customers and visits to their offices.  Manufacturing plant tours have been one of my absolute favorite parts of my job.
• For providing me with an enduring network of smart, talented, passionate colleagues. 
• For being a company I was proud to work for, and really living up to the mission of empowering and enabling.
• For letting me indulge my passion for data by earning a Data Science Certificate, for free, as part of the Microsoft Professional Program pilot in 2016.
• For consistently supporting employee fitness and well-being, and providing the "Stay Fit' funding that was an incentive for me to learn a new sport during the COVID times.
• For OneNote in the cloud, which helps me manage my personal and professional life on a daily (let's face it, hourly) basis.
• For revealing to me one of my apparent superpowers, which is the ability to hold my head very steady during HoloLens demos.  (I got a surprisingly large number of comments about this, and one time a customer viewing a demo remotely on a group call asked if my screen had frozen or was I just that still.)
• Special thanks to the team behind the Standards of Business Conduct videos who made this annual training a fun and looked-forward-to event rather than the drudgery it could easily have been.

I'm so grateful for all I learned and for the friendships I've made.  I wish you all the best.

And now, onward to the next chapter!