Voyeurism stretches to new heights

摘要

Arrive at the Gigapixel Photography Web site and you'll see a gorgeous photo of a dozen condominium towers stretched across the Vancouver skyline, yachts docked in the foreground, dusk bathing the scene in a rich blue hue.rnAfter admiring the shot for a moment, play around with the buttons in the upper left corner: zoom in, zoom out; pan right, pan left...rnNow really zoom in hard and give the page a few seconds to reload. Holy gigapixels, you're right in somebody's living room ... or bedroom. (Fear not, it's all safe for work, near as I can tell.)rnThe Vancouver company explains the technology this way on its site: 'A gigapixel image is a digital image composed of more than 1 billion pixels. It contains more than 150 times the detail captured by a typical 6-megapixel consumer camera.rn"Gigapixel images are created by tiling a large number of photographs, or scanning a large film negative (8"× 10").Gigapixel images are displayed online using streaming technology that breaks the image into small tiles and loads them as you look.This allows you to instantly view high-resolution images that are over several gigabytes in size.rn"Gigapixel photographs are ideal for tourism, real-estate, architecture, medical imaging, archiving and documenting special events. High-resolution images create the impression of'being there' by immersing the viewer within the scene."