The GigaPan takes the tedium out of shooting panoramas PHOTO:
Matt Deans The Golden Temple, Amritsar, India, is stitched from
dozens of snaps, totaling 657 megabytes—enough detail to zoom in
on a face in the crowd. You don’t want to look at the Grand
Canyon through a keyhole—you want it in all its glory, in a
panoramic view. That means taking a lot of overlapping photos
and stitching them together, one by one. Now there’s a robot
that can do the job for you. Called the GigaPan, it’s a small
gray box with a black frame that holds your digital camera in
place on top of a tripod. Once programmed, it automatically
captures hundreds of photos that software later splices into a
high-resolution, gigapixel image. Chalk it up as one of the
space program’s few genuine spin-offs, the product of NASA’s
work on visualization and image analysis for Mars missions. The
commercial developer is the Global Connection Project, led by
Carnegie Mellon University and the NASA Ames Intelligent
Robotics Group, with financial support