Championship Gigapans

[dlavery]

Embedded below is a thumbnail image of one of the gigapan images I shot during the FIRST Championships. Yeah, this is just the thumbnail - click on it to link to the navigable Gigapan version.


The image is stitched together from 280 separate 10-megapixel sub-images. The resulting image is 83,862 pixels by 13,934 pixels - about 1.17 billion pixels total (just a little too large to embed in a standard CD post ). Once you are in the image, you can navigate around, take snapshots, embed tags, and even view the plaza panorama in Google Earth (the panorama has been geolocated, and can be viewed with version 4.2 or later of Google Earth). If your team happened to be wandering through the plaza as the images were being captured, you are probably in there somewhere. Search around, explore, and see if you can find yourself!

These billion-plus-pixel images are created with the Gigapan pan-tilt head and Stitcher software, which were developed as part of the NASA/CMU/Google/NatGeo Global Connection Project. The Stitcher software is a descendant of the software NASA uses to stitch together images from the Panoramic Camera on the Mars Exploration Rovers to generate the highly detailed panoramic views of Mars that you have probably seen.

More gigapans are coming, as soon as I have time to assemble them. The lighting inside the Georgia Dome was hideous, and it is taking some manual intervention to get the color balances normalized to a reasonable state.

A few of the other ones that were mentioned during the Gigapan discussion include a view of the Space Shuttle simulator facility at Johnson Space Center:



The National Botanical Gardens in Washington DC:



and the view of Honolulu and Waikiki Beach from the top of Diamond Head:



(all of these are linked images). Many more gigapan images can be found on the Gigapan web site.

-dave


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[Alex Dinsmoor]

Very very cool, thanks for putting this together. I'm going to forward this to my team

[Sean Schuff]

Sweet pictures but when you zoom in some of the people look like they're only half there. Sort of like how I feel after a season of FIRST!

[pufame]

WOW

I heard you talking about this in Atlanta and I have to admit - I wasn't sure why I was supposed to be impressed, I've seen pans before. But looking at that pan from the Concourse at the Georgia Dome this is really something amazing and can truly revolutionize how people see the world around them.

I think my favorite part of that entire pan was being able to zoom in on the GM tent and read the license plate # on the car you can't even see from the full pan!

[dlavery]

Originally Posted by Sean Schuff

Sweet pictures but when you zoom in some of the people look like they're only half there. Sort of like how I feel after a season of FIRST!

Some of the people ARE only half there!

That is an artifact of the method by which the images are captured. For the plaza image above, it took about 30 minutes to take the 280 sub-images that are embedded in the final version. Obviously, things move during that time. The "partial people" you see are people that moved throughout the scene as successive images were captured.

Could the project have developed a camera that would capture the entire scene in one shot, and thereby avoided the inter-frame motion problem? Yes, but the resulting device would cost about $1.7 million per unit. To get this device down to a price of about $700 per unit (including the consumer-grade digital camera), a few trade-offs had to be made.

-dave


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[Tapoore]

So, when are we going to see the ones you took during Einstein?

[Nate Laverdure]

Originally Posted by dlavery

To get this device down to a price of about $700 per unit (including the consumer-grade digital camera), a few trade-offs had to be made.

Considering that the suggested retail price for the camera in the picture (a Canon Powershot G7) is $550, I would say that being able to lower this device's cost down to $700 is quite an accomplishment!

[Billfred]

I was wondering what you were doing with that stepladder on Einstein--these are awesome!

Just curious, what kind of consumer-grade camera get used with something like this?

[XaulZan11]

Woah, those are really nice pictures. It's almost like I'm there!

Have you used the panorama/stitch feature on Photoshop CS3? If so how does this compare to that?

[Bcliff358]

I believe i see Rick James in a tuxedo. Weird.

[Libby K]

Thanks, Dave! These are really freakin' sweet.

[JesseK]

This is the ultimate Where's Waldo...

[Elgin Clock]

Originally Posted by dlavery

Could the project have developed a camera that would capture the entire scene in one shot, and thereby avoided the inter-frame motion problem? Yes, but the resulting device would cost about $1.7 million per unit......
-dave


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I beg to differ.



There is always an easier & less costly solution if you balance what you need to do versus what you want to do. lol


Edit: Oh wow... the Zoom on the Gigapans is amazing! I'm doubtful the head mounted unit does that well. lol

[dlavery]

Originally Posted by Elgin Clock

I beg to differ.

There is always an easier & less costly solution if you balance what you need to do versus what you want to do. lol

These are not even close in capabilities. Please read the description above carefully, including the resulting image sizes. I stand by the assertion that a single-shot camera system capable of equivalent resolution would be in the price range I cited.

-dave

[Pavan Dave]

I love Dave's gigapans. The first one I ever saw was of the Robonaut lab or something at JSC where I saw one of the engineers like 10 times. 10 times including the "1/2"s and the "1/3"s. ...

If anybody is interested take a look at this related TED:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129


Pavan


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