Assisted time lapse

I was out for a walk today and I started thinking about how my neighbourhood has changed in the time I've been living here. Not drastically or anything, just that slow suburban development along with an increase in people. But it made me wish I had one of those great time-lapse videos that people make. Problem is, who's going to set up a static tripod for half a decade?

But maybe we could make assisted time lapse software, much like the recent generation of assisted panorama software. Instead of having to carefully line up the shot for each photo, you just move your camera around and a display shows you how close you are to replicating the previous shot. Once you've lined it up closely enough, the picture is taken automatically.

I know there are a lot of amazing personal transformation time-lapses that get made which could probably benefit from it too. I think it's really powerful being able to compress time like that, so instead of minutes or hours we can think on the scope of months or years. It'd be nice to have something to make that process a bit easier.