GigaPan panorama by Matt Deans
Many of you have probably heard about the Gigapan project. It has been featured on the Times Online, Popular Photography, Scientific American, and many others. It is an incredible collaboration by Carnegie Mellon and a company called Charmed Labs. The real breakthrough here is a small robotic tripod which can use many consumer-level digital cameras to take hundreds of pictures from many different angles in a short period of time. The built in software then stitches the photos together for incredible panoramas which can be zoomed in and explored. Hundreds of 10 megapixel photos stitched together equal giga-pixel photos. Some photos are so clear you can make out the headlines from newspapers across the room, like this one from the 911 Memorial in Washington D.C.Gigapan is partly funded by the Global Connection Project, which consists of NASA, National Geographic and Google. Google is also integrating some of these panoramas into Google Earth.
