GigaPan is a collaborative project between Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....

 and NASA Ames

NASA Ames Research Center

The Ames Research Center , is one of the United States of America's National Aeronautics and Space Administration 10 major field centers.The centre is located in Moffett Field in California's Silicon Valley, near the high-tech companies, entrepreneurial ventures, universities, and other...

 Intelligent Systems Division's Robotics Group with support from Google. Its goal is to facilitate the taking of large (gigapixel) composite pictures, presenting the data as a single image and providing efficient web storage, browsing and zooming of such images.

Technology

The commercially available GigaPan robotic mounts turn most digital cameras into extremely high-resolution panoramic imagers. The robotic unit guides the user through setting up a panoramic scene, then automates the image acquisition process, precisely taking individual pictures across a grid. These images are downloaded to a personal computer where free software stitches, renders, and projects the images together into a single explorable super-image.
These massive gigapixel-sized images can then be uploaded to the free user community site < http://gigapan.org> which allows high-resolution images to be stored, shared, annotated, commented, linked, geolocated, and embedded on any website. The server-side technology relies on an image pyramid-tiling scheme that enables user interactions to occur in a dynamically resolving image space similar to Google Earth. When interacting with the final composite image, users can for example view the entire panoramic or macropanoramic scene and then zoom into the tiniest details in full resolution.

GigaPan Systems offers the unit for public sale. There are several weblogs of people who created similar devices. The main ingredients are:

• a camera mount bracket
• a tripod mount plate
• two stepper motors or servo motors
• motor driver electronics
• two gear boxes
• either a pull magnet with an arm to push the release button or electronic control for cameras with remote control option
• a micro controller board, even one as simple as a Basic Stamp
  BASIC Stamp
  The BASIC Stamp is a microcontroller with a small, specialized BASIC interpreter built into ROM. It is made by Parallax, Inc. and has been popular with electronics hobbyists since the early 1990s because of its low threshold of learning and ease of use due to its simple to understand BASIC...
  
   will do
• the micro controller software
• housing material

In addition to the acquisition and merging of the image data, an efficient feature is also provided to allow for efficient web client browsing of the data by providing a top-level regular-sized view of the image and the ability to zoom in on any area, transferring only the high-resolution data for that segment of the image.

Community

GigaPan is an open website - anyone can upload photographs to it, and anyone can place comments on those photographs.

Illah R. Nourbakhsh, Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....

 spoke about GigaPan on BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

's "Digital Planet" radio show and podcast on September 11, 2006 .

Stockholm Views publish a review of the beta GigaPan imager and software including some tweaks.

GigaPan has been used by British satellitte television company Sky Movies

Sky Movies

Sky Movies is the collective name for the premium subscription television movie channels operated by Sky Television, and later British Sky Broadcasting. It has around 5 million subscribers, via satellite, cable and IPTV in the UK and Ireland...

 during their Action Month season with lookalikes of action stars such as Bruce Willis

Bruce Willis

Walter Bruce Willis , better known as Bruce Willis, is an American actor, producer, and musician. His career began in television in the 1980s and has continued both in television and film since, including comedic, dramatic, and action roles...

 and Arnold Schwarzenegger

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger is an Austrian-American former professional bodybuilder, actor, businessman, investor, and politician. Schwarzenegger served as the 38th Governor of California from 2003 until 2011....

appearing around London.

External links

• http://www.gigapan.org
• http://www.gigapansystems.com/
• http://www.gigapanner.com/
• http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~globalconn/gigapan.html
• http://howtogigapan.blogspot.com/
• http://rhmpano.com
• GigaLinc - An immersive exhibit to view gigapixel images captured by the GigaPan