Kartta Labs: Collaborative Time Travel

TL;DR

Kartta Labs is an open source platform that combines crowdsourcing and AI to reconstruct historical cities in 3D, enabling collaborative exploration of the past for research, education, and entertainment.

Contribution

It presents a modular, scalable system for city reconstruction from maps and photos, integrating open data and crowdsourcing with AI techniques.

Findings

Successfully reconstructs 3D city models from historical data

Supports collaborative time travel experiences

Open source platform encourages community participation

Abstract

We introduce the modular and scalable design of Kartta Labs, an open source, open data, and scalable system for virtually reconstructing cities from historical maps and photos. Kartta Labs relies on crowdsourcing and artificial intelligence consisting of two major modules: Maps and 3D models. Each module, in turn, consists of sub-modules that enable the system to reconstruct a city from historical maps and photos. The result is a spatiotemporal reference that can be used to integrate various collected data (curated, sensed, or crowdsourced) for research, education, and entertainment purposes. The system empowers the users to experience collaborative time travel such that they work together to reconstruct the past and experience it on an open source and open data platform.