Billion pixel panorama

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with scientists at NASA’s Ames Research Center, have built a low-cost device that enables any digital camera to produce gigapixel (billions of pixels) panoramas, called GigaPans.

The technique gives people a new way to make and share images of their environment. It is being used by students to document their communities and by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to make Civil War sites accessible on the web.

To promote further sharing of this imagery, Carnegie Mellon has launched a public Web site called www.gigapan.org where people can upload and interactively explore panoramic images of any format.

In cooperation with Google, researchers have also created a GigaPan layer on Google Earth. Anyone using Google Earth can now fly into these GigaPan panoramas.

Researchers have also begun a public beta process with the GigaPan hardware, web site, and software. The hardware enabling GigaPan images is a robotic camera mount, jointly designed and manufactured by Charmed Labs of Austin, Texas.