Gigapan photography: A new way of seeing!
Rich Gibson is visiting New York City from his normal digs in California (he works for the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA-Ames/CMU-West). NYCR has asked him to give a public talk about the work he’s been doing on the Gigapan project (http://www.gigapan.org) — and you’re all invited!
Gigapan photographs are gigapixel panoramic images, composed of many (sometimes hundreds) of individual photos taken with an ordinary consumer camera using a robotic unit that simplifies the process of capturing the images and later stitching them together. The result is explorable panoramas of astonishing depth.
Rich will start at 7pm with a short slideshow and talk, then shift to a demonstration of the hardware and software that makes the whole thing possible. We look forward to seeing you!
I like the idea, but is this conceptually different from the photostitch software that comes with my Canon point & shoot camera? I assume this is higher quality somehow, but is that the only difference?
Well you are stitching photos yes, but you are also moving a camera in a fashion that allows it to build a grid work of shots, all the while preserving perspective by keeping the focal point of the lens close to stationary.
Automating the total process makes for a point and shoot ultra high res imaging device. Play with the code a bit and you could throw in things like high dynamic range lighting effects.
See also http://www.gigapxl.org/