PUBLICATION CENTER

Professional freelance photographer David Bergman used the GigaPan Epic to create a sweeping image of President Obama presenting his Inaugural address to millions of Americans. The image is so detailed that viewers can zoom in to recognize individual faces.  Millions of people have visited the GigaPan.org website to find themselves in the crowd.

“The story I wanted to convey was the sheer size of the crowd. No single lens could have captured the scene at that quality,” says Bergman.

Here’s how the GigaPan Epic works:  First, you attach a digital camera to the Epic, a small robotic mount that automates that picture-taking process.  Then, after the camera takes hundreds or thousands of shots of the selected scene, the images are downloaded to a computer where the GigaPan stitching software automatically combines them into a panorama.

The panorama can then be uploaded to the GigaPan.org website where your image can be viewed by a global community. The GigaPan Viewer on the site allows people to zoom in and out to explore the panoramas in detail.

The high-resolution imaging technology is the result of years of research by scientists at NASA and Carnegie Mellon University. The founder and CEO of GigaPan Systems Henry Hillman says that “the GigaPan.org site already features more than 10,000 panoramas. Our beta users have taken fantastic panoramas not only of President Obama’s Inauguration, but of Yankee Stadium, Chicago skylines, and Hawaiian landscapes. “

File sizes can become quite large depending on how many images you choose to combine. The average-size panorama on giganpan.org is under 1 gigapixel, but the largest is 11 gigapixels. Bergman’s historic shot of President Obama’s inaugural is 220 individual images combined into a 1.45-gigapixel panorama.

The City of Chicago’s new tourism website features enormous GigaPan panoramas of Chicago.  As part of the launch of the website, millions of visitors to Chicago O’Hare Airport will see an exhibit of 30 x 10 ft. mural-size photographs of iconic Chicago locations captured with the GigaPan system.

According to a company spokesperson, “The incredible resolution of GigaPan images results in amazing prints.”  For the airport exhibit, a Mimaki JV5 inkjet printer is being used to produce the 30 x 10 ft. murals of some of the panoramic shots featured on Chicago’s new tourism website.

The GigaPan Epic robotic camera mount with integrated GigaPan Stitcher software and GigaPan Viewer is now available for $379. A second model for larger point-and-shoot digital cameras will be available soon for $449. To use the GigaPan Stitcher software, the company recommends that you have at least 2 GB of RM and 30 GB of free space on a PC with XP or Vista or at least an Intel-based Mac OX 1.4.