We’ve mentioned gigapan technology before.

Take a look at this incredible 1,474 Megapixel image of President Barack Obama’s inaugural address.

Details of how he did it at David Bergman’s site:

My final photo is made up of 220 Canon G10 images and the file is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels or 1,474 megapixels. It took more than six and a half hours for the Gigapan software to put together all of the images on my Macbook Pro and the completed TIF file is almost 2 gigabytes.

This is amazing technology – click the image above to view and explore the full-size image – zoom into the crowd and wonder at the detail captured …

Via Memex 1.1

I follow John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 Blog, John has a real nack of finding and promoting new technology, he’s just written a blog article on the GigaPan motorised robot pan device.

Which leads to this article in the New York Times Technology section.

It’s been developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, in the States. You simply attach your standard digital camera and set it to pan across and take sectional images of a panoramic scene which can then be combined into a single Giga pixel image!

Take a look at some of those gigapixel results at gigapan.org. The results (from basic digital cameras) are amazing, and great controls on that website allow you to drag the image around and zoom-in to reveal fascinating details that you would not have believed were within the image.

One of the demo shots that I just checked-out shows a panoramic side view of Bath Abbey, it then zooms-in to the shop window at the very right edge of the panorama and shows the detail of a pattern on a mug in the shop window – real WOW technology!!

They hope to be able to make the Giga Pan device available for less than $500.

Can anybody see any surveillance applications for this????

Take a look at this example shot in a baseball stadium!