This 3-Year Timelapse Reveals How Quickly Seattle Has Grown

In January 2015, a 360-degree HD webcam was installed on top of the iconic Space Needle in Seattle. Ricardo Martin Brualla amassed still frames over the past 3 years and created this beautiful 4-minute time-lapse video showing how much Seattle has been developed over this period of time.

Brualla is a Google researcher whose interests include computational photography. He gathered together a total of 2,166 panoramas shot by the webcam — two ~9-megapixel photos per day (shot at 10:30am and 2:30pm), every day for the past 3 years.

The photos were then stabilized and smoothed temporally “to remove the variation due to weather and lighting conditions” (i.e. the jarring flickering that occurs in these types of timelapses). Here’s a short video that shows how the timelapse was made:

“It is fascinating to observe it at a larger time-scale, as my video shows,” Brualla tells The Seattle Times. “However, I’m still impressed with what’s coming up. If you walk/bike/drive through South Lake Union and Denny, there are still a lot of projects in the early stages of development or that have not broken ground yet! Seattle is going to continue changing very fast.”

You can read more about how this project was done in this write-up by Brualla.