Foto Friday – Forget Megapixel – Try a Gigapan

You might think this a nice panoramic:

But you would be wrong! This is actually 220 separate pictures stitched together into one panoramic. Check out the detail you can get:

(Yes, it’s zoomed up from the original picture. Is that Justice Thomas sleeping?) This amazing process is called GigaPan and it is something I instantly fell in love with. We can’t embed their viewer software here on Scrappers Workshop so follow this link and zoom into and scroll around this picture. I”ll wait until you get back…

All I can say is WOW. The technology came out of Google, Carnegie Mellon University and NASA Ames Intelligent Systems Division’s Robotics Group and is just now being made available to the public. The process works kind of like a panoramic except you zoom up real close to a tiny portion of what you want to photograph and then take 100′s to 1000′s of pictures. They are then stitched together into one panoramic of incredible detail. GigaPan has even created and is selling a device (the Epic – details here) that will hold just about any point and shoot digital camera and automatically move the camera and take the pictures for you. If you want to try it yourself without the Epic, it’s not hard – it just takes a little pre-planning and a lot of patience! Their custom stitching software is not yet available but I’ll post here again when it is and if I successfully make one of these!

For more great GigaPans go to www.gigapan.org and browse around.

Till next week – Keep Snappin’

Stan