Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Recently, it has been shown that vision-language models (VLMs) have a certain intrinsic understanding of time. They can estimate the temporal origin of objects and encode time along a low-dimensional, non-linear manifold inside their embedding space~\cite{tekaya2025matter}. That result is quantitative and reproducible, but the structure itself stays out of reach for end users: they cannot see it, query it with their own images, or inspect where a query lands relative to other years on the time axis. We present TimeLineXR, an interactive demonstration that turns this time axis into an explorable 3D scene. A web demo lets users upload or select images and see each placed on a color-coded 3D time axis; a Three.js WebXR scene renders the same time axis as a room-scale representation that can be grabbed, scaled, inspected, and queried by throwing image cards into it. Both clients run the same prediction pipeline against the same cached temporal index: encode the query with CLIP, project it through cosine-kernel KPCA, and snap it to the Bézier time axis. The system turns each image into a point on the time axis, so users can compare where different objects land and read off their estimated first year of appearance.Code source and reproduction steps can be found in: https://github.com/sterngefeuert/timeline-xr.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Institutions: TU Wien, University of Applied Sciences St Pölten
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7224109249