Gigapan Makes Your Camera Shoot at 1,000 Megapixels

A device called the Gigapan will soon be available. It allows virtually any camera to take digital pictures that are more than a gigapixel in resolution (that's 1,000 megapixels.) For reference, the typical cameras these days are around 10 megapixels. Yikes!

Using a robot mounted on a tripod, Gigapan commands the camera to take roughly 350 highly-zoomed individual images that are later pieced together by a program on the user's home computer. The end-product being what is essentially an extremely deep 2-dimensional image with multiple levels of zooming and panning. It's basically Google Earth for whatever you're looking at.

Developed for the Global Connection Project by academics at Carnegie Mellon University, one of the goals is to provide information about foreign lands to anyone curious but not wealthy enough to travel the world. When reached for comment, TheFeed's own bleahy, a Carnegie Mellon alumnus, said, "Nerds."

There is no release date or price point for this badass piece of nerdphoto technology but they're saying it should be around $300, while previous panoramic camera set-ups run in the $35,000 neighborhood.

A zoomable shot of Golden Gate Park with people cut in half...

timesonline: Billion-pixel panoramas -- from your own camera