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| Browsing through time and space with GigaPan and Chrome Posted: 22 Apr 2011 04:24 PM PDT From the presidential inauguration to the World Series to gorgeous cityscapes, for the past few years the GigaPan team at Carnegie Mellon University has been making it possible to explore breathtaking panoramic photos from around the world. GigaPan pioneered the hardware design that captures these photos and used innovative rendering techniques—similar to those of Google Maps—to create seamless transitions between photos, so people can pan and zoom through the image for an interactive and incredibly detailed photo experience. Yesterday, the GigaPan team took their creative and technical skills to the next level with the GigaPan Time Machine, which brings this same kind of visual interactivity to video using the power of HTML5 and modern browser technology. Time Machine works particularly well on Google Chrome, thanks to its support for the latest HTML5 features and its stability architecture, which ensures it can smoothly run complex web applications without crashing. Time Machine is featured on the gallery of Chrome Experiments, a showcase of creative web applications submitted by developers around the world, and built using the latest web technologies. The sophisticated cameras the GigaPan team uses for their photographs capture hundreds or even thousands of digital pictures and stitch them together to form an interactive panorama. With Time Machine, the cameras capture these image mosaics at regular intervals to create a video with hundreds of millions or even billions of pixels in each frame. The result is a video that viewers have the ability to zoom in on while it's playing and see incredible detail. With Time Machine, watching paint dry or grass grow is actually pretty cool. Take a look at a table full of potted plants grow and bloom into flowers. Zoom in to examine a specific plant or even a single leaf, or watch a caterpillar bite off a leafy green for lunch. One of the critical elements of making Time Machine work was developing algorithms that allow the site to shift seamlessly from one portion of a video to another, to give people the experience of zooming and panning across a video of almost limitless resolution. This is particularly challenging because a seamless transition between videos requires starting a new video before the old one is finished, and then queueing it to align perfectly in time before the swap. The GigaPan researchers were able to accomplish this successfully using HTML5's video tag feature, as well as by taking advantage of Chrome's speed and stability to render the content smoothly as videos start and stop dynamically. While you can't fast-forward to the weekend (yet), head over to GigaPan's Time Machine to zoom around in space and time with some of the samples, or create your own Time Warp by building your own animated tour through any of the sample videos.      |
| Posted: 22 Apr 2011 02:01 PM PDT This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label "This week in search" and subscribe to the series. - Ed. This week, we sped up search by bringing more predictions to autocomplete and enabling Google Instant in the new Google Toolbar 7 for Internet Explorer. You'll also find more personalization for the tools you use most in this new version of Toolbar, as well as in Google News, which we updated with new features to help you find more articles on topics you're interested in. More predictions in autocomplete One of the main ways autocomplete predicts searches while you type is by looking at the most popular searches on Google. This week we improved autocomplete for less common, longer and more complicated queries so that now we make predictions based on the last word or words of your search, getting you results even faster. For example, previously you wouldn't have gotten a prediction for [online store with underwater gadgets] since few people have searched for that exact query. But many more have searched for [underwater gadgets], so by looking at just the last part of what you've typed into the box, we can now generate a prediction for "gadgets." You'll see a dropdown box below the end of your search with predictions for just that word. This change is currently available for all google.com users in English.  Google Toolbar 7 with Toolbar Instant We continued to bring the speed of Google Instant to more places with this week's launch of Google Toolbar 7 for Internet Explorer 8 and 9. Once you enable Instant under "Toolbar Options," you'll see search predictions and results appear as you type in the Toolbar search box. The new Toolbar also sports a cleaner look, and is more personalized—showing you only the tools you use the most. It's currently available in English, but we'll be bringing it to other supported languages over the next week. Visit www.google.com/toolbar to download the new Google Toolbar 7. Automatic personalization and Recommended Sections in Google News Yesterday, the U.S. English edition of Google News got two new features: automatic personalization and a recommendations gadget. When logged into your Google account, you'll now see stories based on your news-related web history. For instance, if you click on a lot of articles about baseball, we'll make sure you get a chance to see breaking baseball news. In the new Recommended Sections in the right-hand column, you'll see suggested topics to follow based on stories you've clicked before. Learn more about personalization features in the Help Center.  Finally, before you head off for the weekend, don't forget to test your search skills and try solving today's A Google a Day question at www.agoogleaday.com:      |
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