One spot.Several centuries.

Every picture below is the same place as the one beside it, from the same position, in a different year. Nothing moved but the date.

One run, start to finish — a pin on the Colosseum, the lever, and the four frames below rendered into a film. The waits are compressed and labelled with the rate; the two moments that matter are left at real speed.

This is not a record of the past. Nothing here was looked up. Each frame is a machine's best guess at a place it never saw, built out of whatever happened to survive and out of how the past has been pictured ever since. Treat it as how we imagine 1810 looked, not as how 1810 looked.

Rome — the Colosseum

1700 · 1810 · 1915 · 2015

Four frames, one camera. The cypress on the right survives three of them, which is the easiest way to check that the viewpoint held.

The Colosseum in 1700, overgrown, with a dirt road and figures walking — 1700

The Colosseum in 1810, horse carriages on a paved road — 1810

The Colosseum in 1915, crowds and carriages — 1915

The Colosseum in 2015, scaffolding, tourists and modern railings — 2015

Berlin — Potsdamer Platz

1928 · 1946 · 1972 · 2022

The widest swing of anything here — the busiest square in Europe, then rubble, then the ground the Wall ran through, then glass. Honestly: the camera does not hold across these four. The vantage moves between them. It is the best illustration on this page of both what the thing can do and where it breaks.

Potsdamer Platz in 1928, crowds, a horse cart and an advertising column — 1928

Potsdamer Platz in 1946, rubble and gutted buildings — 1946

Potsdamer Platz in 1972, empty ground and barbed wire — 1972

Potsdamer Platz in 2022, glass towers and bike racks — 2022

San Francisco — Fort Point

1913 · 2013

The strait, the shoreline and the headlands are the same in both. The bridge is the only thing that arrives.

Fort Point in 1913, black and white, an empty strait with no bridge — 1913

Fort Point in 2013, the Golden Gate Bridge spanning the strait — 2013

Point it somewhere yourself

Drop a pin anywhere on Earth, dial a year between the Great Dying and 3050, and pull the lever. One page, no backend, no account — it runs in your browser and talks to the model provider directly.

github.com/TengHu/GL4SS

You bring your own API key · nothing is generated until you pull the lever