GigaPan: Click 50 Megapixels Panoramic Pictures With a 5MP Point-n-Shoot Camera!

Feb 9, 2009 by Abbas

(4 votes, average: 4.25 out of 5)

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GigaPan GigaPan is a revolutionary off-the-camera technology which helps a photographer click amazing panoramic pictures loaded with great details using a regular point and shoot camera.

I’ll get to the details right away. GigaPan is not a just gadget or software alone, this systems works together with both, hardware and software and a little bit of human input to create HUGE/high-resolution panoramic images.

One of the most recently clicked/published images which enjoyed a lot of attention was the GigaPan of President Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address. The image is made of 1756 pictures stitched together and the image resolution after the stitching comes to 1.47 gigapixels. . Click here to check it out.

The technology is a collaborative efforts of researchers from Nasa and Carnegie Mellon University. GigaPan system uses the same panoramic photo technology used by Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.

So how does this thing really work?

All you got to do is mount a camera on the robotic imager and mark your points (right and left) to be photographed. Once that is done the system immediately calculates the number of pictures it would take to create a hi-res panorama. Once the wizard is completed the robotic imager starts clicking pictures automatically.

The imager can shoot upto 1000-1100 pictures in 30 minutes and can create an image anywhere from 50 megapixels to 5 gigapixels and beyond. Isn’t that amazing?

Once these pictures are shot all you got to do is stitch them using GigaPan Stitcher and upload to GigaPan.org and start sharing it with friends and family.

GigaPan is quite reasonable and rightly priced at $379 and does work with most of the point and shoot camera’s available in the market (click here to check the list of compatible cameras). GigaPan will soon release a new product called EPIC 100 which will support larger cameras available in the market.

I have embedded about 5 videos on this article, the first four are GigaPan Tutorials and the last one is a tech talk about GigaPan from Google (Google Inc. was one of the project participants).

GigaPan Tutorial 1 of 4.