Google Open-Sources 3D System That Shows How Places Looked in the Past

Historians and nostalgic residents alike take an interest in how cities were constructed and how they developed -- and now there's a tool for that. Google AI recently launched the open-source browser-based toolset "rǝ," which was created to enable the exploration of city transitions from 1800 to 2000 virtually in a three-dimensional view. Google AI says the name rǝ is pronounced as "re-turn" and derives its meaning from "reconstruction, research, recreation and remembering." This scalable system runs on Google Cloud and Kubernetes and reconstructs cities from historical maps and photos. There are three main components to the toolset. Warper is a crowdsourcing platform,where users can upload photos of historical print maps and georectify them to match real world coordinates.