Gigapixel Panoramas
Today's digital cameras are taking extremely high resolution images. When you start stitching them together with products like Windows Live Photo Gallery, you can easily end up with gigapixel images. Viewing that on a normal monitor just doesn't do it justice.
The Microsoft Research team has an interesting product called HDView. Instead of downloading the entire picture, you can zoom into specific areas of the picture and see higher resolution. This saves time, bandwidth, and also makes for a fun viewing experience.
A number of examples are available on the team's website. You'll need to install a plug-in to use it and it only works on Internet Explorer in Windows.
They provide a toolkit for creating your own HDView images. I dug out some photos that I took last year on a hike around Mt. Rainier with my parents. These images actually come out to a full 360 degree view. Once it loads you can zoom out and zoom in. It's not nearly as interesting as the team's demos, but it's cool to see it working on my own photos. I'm going to try to create some better examples on my own trips this year. The basic method for taking photos like this is:
- Use a tripod
- Use the manual exposure settings so that you get consistent coloring across pictures. Stitching tools can handle minor variations but have trouble with big differences.
- Zoom all the way in to the max optical zoom level.
- Snap photos in a grid pattern.
- Load them into Windows Live Photo Gallery and let it stitch the photos together.
- Run the HDView tools to create the tiles and web page.
