Google's Project Loon Serve Internet to The World

Project Loon is Google's audacious experiment to bring the Internet to the world, ferried on the back of high-altitude balloons. A new video posted to Project Loon's Google+ page gives us a behind-the-scenes look at this radical (and, well, loony) endeavor.

Google's Project Loon balloons serve as a sort of aerial network, navigating stratospheric winds and communicating with an area's wireless provider, ground-based antennas and one another to potentially offer connectivity to anyone with a smartphone. The aim is to bring Internet access to the 2 out of 3 people in the world who aren't connected. Back in June of 2014, Project Loon successfully beamed the Internet into the classrooms of a small town in rural Brazil, marking a significant "first" for the project.

The project has come a long way since it was first announced back in June of 2013. A balloon that once took 3 to 4 days to create can now be produced in a just a few hours. Google launches these balloons with automated cranes and can now launch dozens of balloons a day. And these can stay aloft for over a hundred days -- a mission-control center has been set up to keep track of the thousands of balloons that will be maneuvering about the globe, guiding them into ideal places to maximize Internet coverage.

Check out Google's behind-the-scenes video for a closer look at the project.