Gigapan: The Image Maker

摘要

It's easy to create impressive-looking panoramic images, like the one you see on this page. Here, we are talking about going a step further with Gigapixel images; images with one billion pixels or more. To put that into perspective, 5 Megapixels is 5 million pixels. To create a Gigapixel image, you need to make a huge, panoramic image, consisting of hundreds of smaller photographs stitched together. Now this has been easier said than done uptil now. With any normal 8 or 10 Megapixel image that you take, you can possibly zoom in on a PC a few times, but beyond a certain point, everything wili be horribly pixelated and fuzzy. Now, with a simple digital camera and a robotic mount called the Gigapan EPIC, you can create a huge panorama with tremendous amounts of detail. A gigapixel image does require a fairly beefed up PC to create. And web viewers only download bits of the image at a time, allowing for easy viewing.