System allows gigapixel photo navigation using hand gestures

The system, which employs Microsoft’s Kinect motion capture device, allows users to first select an image, to scroll and zoom using sweeps of the hand and finally to print out specific sections of interest.

Although the original concept is intended as an art installation, the technology could be useful for navigating detailed astronomical images and microscopic slides from biomedical research.

‘What I wanted to do was get people immersed in images,’ said Samuel Cox, a masters student in digital imaging at Lincoln University. ‘If you go to a normal photographic gallery, you look at images on the wall and it’s quite a passive experience — you don’t really interact with them.’

Current technology for creating gigapixel images — those containing one billion (10⁹) pixels or more — usually involves making mosaics of a large number of high-resolution digital photographs.

Cox uses a 16-megapixel digital SLR camera with a long-lens zoom mounted on a robotic tripod setup that can take grid co-ordinate inputs. He takes between 200 and 350 photographs per scene, overlapping them by around 30 per cent, which takes around 45 minutes.