Eye Current: Make That Picture An Ultra Wide

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Make That Picture An Ultra Wide

Scientists at NASA's Ames Research Center have been working with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University to build a robotic device that gives any digital camera the ability to take gigapixel (billions of pixels) panoramas, which are named, GigaPans. With this device on your camera anyone can shoot interactive panoramas that, if put on the Internet; enable you to examine the photos in great depth and detail.

The device makes the digital camera take a quick series of photos that are later "stitched" together, to create a digital panoramic image. The resulting images can then be uploaded to a public website and looked at closer so you can actually see many things you've never noticed before. Lets stop and think about this for a second; on average any digital camera you find will be around 7 megapixels, meaning it can take standard sized photos with a resolution of up to 7 million pixels. Now, the GigaPan lets you take PANORAMIC photos using a full GIGAPIXEL. That's a photo that is at least 140 times the pixels than most average cameras can take when they are right out of the box.

Project Scientist from Carnegie Mellon West, Randy Sargent, stumbled upon his idea for GigaPan as a technical staff member at NASA's Ames Research Center while he was helping to develop software for stitching pictures into panoramas that came from Mars Exploration Rovers. He was quickly convinced that the same technology could open the public's eyes to the diversity of their own planet.

Sargent thinks the GigaPan could become an important tool for ecologists, biologists, and other scientists. The researchers have already worked with Google and created a GigaPan layer on Google Earth. Now anyone who uses Google Earth can fly into these GigaPan panoramas to explore the terrain of the world.

So now I offer a question, What shuttle would you take to get to Sunset? GigaPan Of The Golden Gate Bridge.