Check out the zoom on this...

This this is quite cool, the world most detailed picture, I think it is 2.5 gigapixels.

May take a while to clear up after zooming in if you got a slow connection.

Makes you wonder if the future might see parking tickets issued from a guy infront of a screen.

http://www.tpd.tno.nl/Pics/DII/gigazoom/Delft2.htm

 

yeah, I've got a cd rom in the house that came with the Times (a couple of years ago) and it got various views of the UK which you can zoom into - not that it was intelf a single photo, but the concept was good as you'd have a view like that of the intro to eastenders and you could zoom in and see cars parked in a street!

 

check out World Wind :-

http://learn.arc.nasa.gov/worldwind/graphics/screenshots/25.jpg

 

That is astonishing is this for real?

Reminds me of bladerunner when he is searching through the picture, amazing stuff.

They could have come up with an interesting picture!

 

I don;t know mabye this is a bit of BS, if you zoom right in on certain areas it looks fishy, for instance there is a person walking down the main drag with no head!

Still had me going.

 

yeah, I've just looked and found him - black trousers ans white t-shirt...in fact its cut from his chest upwards..!!

 

Still wouldn't it be fantastic if it were possible!

No doubt one day Thomas, men will walk on the moon....

 

And of course the fact that there is no 2.5g censor, that would probably account for a lot of my suspicion!

 

No one is claiming that it's from a single sensor. It's stitched together from a large number of pics, just like the first gigapixel image (of Bryce Canyon, Utah) was.

 

Here's the BBC News story about it:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4022149.stm

It was stiched together from thousands of shots. The people in the image who only have half a body are the result of mutliple overlapping images taken of the scene at different times and then being stiched together by computer.

Michael.

 

Cool. Thanks for the clarification, in the light of this new evidence all we can really be astounded at is the software that bought all the images together which no doubt was hugely time consuming and costly, so a bit pointless!

 

There are certain organisations that are very interested in this type of thing. So you're probably right: costly and pointless.

 

Ah I see, I thought there must have been a fair amount of stiching going on. Quite good although they could have picked a more interesting city.

 

TNO are based in Delft, hence they took the picture there I suspect . They're the Dutch equivalent of the UK NPL for those that don't know.

 

gary,
in the late 80's there was a game called 'the president is missing' for the amiga. this used similar technology (which after all is extraordinarily similar to how texture mapping works) to allow the player to zoom into a picture. all it's really doing is not showing certain pixels and scanlines in the picture. according to the zoom level different pixels are shown and not shown to fill the visible area. there is probably a bit of filtering going on to smooth the unzoomed image to reduce jaggies and moire artifacts but it's all 'off the shelf' stuff.
the software used to produce the images would just need to be able to move large chunks of memory around. the tough bit would be organising the positioning of the camera(s) and taking the photos in such a way as to cover the whole area desired.
cheers


julian

 

Indeed, there must be some super camera and tripod set up to get the desired effect, there dosn't for instance appear to be extreme edge distortion so I am at a loss to know just how they have done this so acuratly, but as mentioned it must have been a very time consuming and difficult job and therefore in real world applications I find it difficult to see how it could be useful at this stage.

I am still dreaming of a 2.5g mega pixal camera LOL, imagine the size of the files!

 

The first Gigapixel image was shot hand-held.

The distortion you refer to does not occur because the field of view of the overall, huge, image is fairly narrow. Each individual shot is taken with a long telephoto.

 

It is amazing. However, agree it would have been infinitely more interesting is they have set up the camera in many more locations that comes to mind. Like near a beach on a sunny day. Just think of all the nice puppies you could adore that people take to the beach for a walk. Or check out all the variations of sand castle children builds. Or just maybe a some girls ..........