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Wednesday September 26, 2007
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A picture is worth a thousand words and, now, thanks to some ultra-smart researchers at Carnegie Melon University and NASA Ames' Research Center, over a billion pixels. The braniacs have found a way to take multiple (think hundreds) of images of a single landscape and combine them into one massive, interactive panoramic photo that you can view in total or zoom all the way into, say, a logo on the back of someone's t-shirt a mile away.
The technology sounds achingly simply. Take a standard digital camera, a robotics tripod developed by Charmed Labs in Austin, shoot photos across the entire panoramic landscape and then seamlessly blend them (by stitching and placing them in a grid) to create an ultra-wide photo that can show you a vista as big as Utah's Salt Lake Flats or as relatively small as cemetery in Durham, CT. The idea sprung out of Ames' efforts to stitch together Mars Rover photos to deliver panoramic views of the red planet to Earth-bound researchers.
You can check out the technology's handy work at Gigapan.org. I suggest you examine out the cemetery shot. I zoomed from a full view of the cemetery all the way to a hook on the red barn way, way in the distance (see photo above).
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September 28, 2007 4:47 AM
I think what would make this sort of application really fly is a better way of positioning/zooming the picture, rather than just using your mouse. I'm thinking trackball plus a joystick - one for hotspot positioning, the other for zooming in and out... run it on a 32" LCD screen and you'd have an awesome interactive experience...