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"  For many people, the 8-megapixel photos their smartphone camera takes are good enough. Those that want more than a quick snapshot could spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on a digital SLR camera. But even the fanciest consumer camera doesn&amp;#039;t hold a candle to David Brady&amp;#039;s project at Duke University. His customized camera takes photos that are gigapixels in size, dwarfing the best SLRs.  Normally, if you want a bigger photo, you would get a wider camera lens. But it&amp;#039;s more complicated than that\u2014the lens also has to be able to bring the visual field into focus and form a clear image. Increasing the size of the lens alone introduces geometric aberrations, which ultimately result in blur. The most expensive lenses (some of which can cost more than the cameras they&amp;#039;re attached to) are made to reduce these aberrations as best they can.  Brady opted for a different approach. Rather than force a single lens to do all the work, he took advantage of the fact that smaller lenses found in microcameras don&amp;#039;t have large aberrations, even if they don&amp;#039;t cover as much space. If he grouped multiple microcameras into an array, he thought, then they could all take pictures simultaneously. Each microcamera&amp;#039;s picture could be stitched together with its neighbors, resulting in a big and detailed photo.      Oliver Corssairt, a researcher at the Computer Vision Laboratory at Columbia University, has played with this idea in his own work. You might have seen his 1.7-gigapixel &amp;quot;Gigapan&amp;quot; photos. Panorama photos of his office space showcase the level of detail in gigapixel images; you see the individual lines that span George Washington&amp;#039;s face on the dollar bill or the tangled network of fibers that give a loofah its texture. But Corssairt&amp;#039;s photos are only a simulation of a microcamera array. The panoramas themselves are actually the result of a single camera taking a series of photos at fixed locations.  Where Brady&amp;#039;s new technology shines, Corssairt says, is being able to both coordinate the activity of the microcameras and process the resulting image quickly. &amp;quot;The really amazing thing about [this project] is that they actually built the system. This is the first time I had seen full gigapixel imagery. That was really impressive.&amp;quot;   Demonstration of a gigapixel photo, taken of the Seattle skyline. Credit: Nature / Brady et. al. Brady says he likes the fact that looking at a gigapixel photo is an interactive experience. It&amp;#039;s up to the viewers to discover all the photo&amp;#039;s details on their own. &amp;quot;People can&amp;#039;t absorb all the info that&amp;#039;s in a gigapixel photo, but they can zoom in and out and explore. The picture becomes a thing that you can interact with. We changed the nature of what an image is.&amp;quot; Don&amp;#039;t hold your breath for a consumer version. The camera is housed in a bulky box that needs its own power supply to operate. Each gigapixel photo takes up nearly 3 GB of memory, on par with a 2-hour HD movie. But gigapixel tech does have promise for science, ranging from tracking microscopic cellular activity across an entire organism to telescopic star activity in the night sky. Perhaps even CSI&amp;#039;s fancy zoom and enhance features will become a reality. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a7832/the-gigapixel-camera-is-born-9947709/>