Now, bring history to life with a digicam

There's good news for all the history fans! Scientists have come up with a new technology that allows the superimposition of a historic photo on an up-to-date snap of the same scene.

Technology allows the superimposition of a historic photo on an up-to-date snap of the same scene. But this new pic must be clicked from the same spot and the same zoom level or else the combined image looks disjointed.

HT Image

However, a unique new software can now help you get your shot-framing spot on.

Frédo Durand and Soonmin Bae at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, with Aseem Agarwala of Adobe Systems in San Jose, California, turned to a technique called visual homing to come up with the software.

Visual homing is used in robotics to send a machine to a precise location, such as a charging station.

The new software runs on a laptop linked to a digital camera. It compares the camera’s view to a preloaded historical scene and throws up instructions to adjust the camera’s position and zoom to best match the scene, reports The New Scientist.

The laptop, however, is a temporary measure. The team “envision the tool running directly on the camera.”

The work appears in ACM Transactions On Graphics.