This is an amazing web page!
A group of imaging adventurers got together to put together a 26 GigaPixel image of Paris. The results are breath taking.
Go to the site at http://www.paris-26-gigapixels.com/index-en.html
If you have a mouse with wheel, your navigation is simple and instinctive. If you do not, you will need to use the on-screen navigation tool. This is a bit clunkier but does not diminish the experience much at all.
Not only did the team stitch together a breathtaking panorama of this wonderful city, but they also employ a texture dissolving technology that smoothly fades to closer and closer shots as you zoom into the image. This is a relative of the technology that was originally developed by Keyhole and that forms the foundation of how Google Earth works.
As you zoom in, you just keep getting closer and closer with the sharpness of the image restoring as the next texture downloads.
The result allows you to see which window sills need painting from on a building 3 kilos away!
The music they chose for this virtual tour is also striking. It is La Valse d’Amélie from the soundtrack of the movie “Amelie” (Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain). The author is the French musician and composer Yann Tiersen.
Check out http://www.autopano.net/en/ for the company that provided the panoramic stitching software.
IMAGINING APPLICATIONS
They placed the installation up on the roof of the high-rise, nestled up among the antenna farms about three kilometers from London's new Olympic facilities.
The imaging array looked like dual 2 meter radar balls, except for the bristling collection of lenses that sprouted from each. Some lenses were telephoto, while others were wide angle, each lens feeding its light to a 25 megapixel image capturing chip.
In total, the 500 lenses from each ball provided a 260 degree wide, 100 degree tall, 25 gigapixel, stereoscopic panorama of the city that lay below. It captured a new image of the city every 30th of a second and in the time space between the image captures, a bank of GPUs (graphic processing units) processed the image into a massive 3D world you could fly around in.
The super video system had been conceived as a security measure for the 2012 London Olympic Games. It had since become a major tourist attraction in the burgeoning "virtual tourism" trade.
Privacy concerns had spawned some protests in the beginning, but those faded away as soon as crime statistics showed massively reduced incidents and increased arrests on west facing London streets. It was simply not a good idea to assault someone or steal a car under the glaring globes that somehow got dubbed SuperAnaCam.
Most of west facing London simply knew that they needed to draw their shades for privacy... To the Facebook generation, it simply seemed like another online exploration - although a new phenom developed with the tweeting of image location where you could to catch a "window show".
New installations were being planned in major and even minor metros, inspiring vistas, and other key locations around the globe. Rumors circulated that Google was going to buy the company and integrate the AnaCams into a real-time view on Google Earth.
This is Theo, imagining technology applications in REALLY high res.
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