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


.