This is a Quick Hit Thursday Podcast short. This week we’re talking with Dr. Illah Nourbakhsh of Carnegie Mellon University about the GigaPan Platform.
The GigaPan was developed at CMU by Dr. Nourbakhsh, an associate professor of robotics, with the help of the NASA Ames Intelligent Robot Group. The GigaPan idea originated with Randy Sargent, formerly of NASA and now a CMU faculty member based in California. He, Dr. Nourbakhsh and their research team developed an earlier version of the imaging technology for the Mars Exploration Rovers that NASA used to create and explore panoramic images of the Martian surface. It is a robot which transforms your digital camera into a powerful image-maker.
The GigaPan robotic platform takes continuous snapshots of a place or an event. Then the software provided by the research team produces a panoramic image built from all these snapshots. The final image is zoomable, so you have the best of two worlds – big panoramas and startling details. Here’s a sample image of the Cape Vincent Lighthouse in Upstate New York.
There is a ton of data on the image, but here are some of the important points:
Size: 0.43 gigapixels
Field of View: 111.03 degrees wide, 42.8 degrees high
Panorama size: 427 megapixels (33308 x 12840 pixels)
Input images: 105 (15 columns by 7 rows)
Field of view: 111.0 degrees wide by 42.8 degrees high (top=34.1, bottom=-8.7)
Camera make: Canon
Camera model: Canon PowerShot G10
Image size: 4416×3312 (14.6 megapixels)
Aperture: f/8
Exposure time: 0.008
ISO: 100
Focal length (35mm equiv.): 142.3 mm
Digital zoom: off
White balance: Automatic
Exposure mode: Manual
To listen to the full podcast interview, click on the player’s forward arrow below. You can also play the Podcast in a popup window, download it OR subscribe to it via iTunes. We created a special GigaPan for this Podcast and it will open up in a popup window, just click, load and zoom around the image.
Podcast: Play in new window
