April 21, 2011 - Introducing GigaPan Time Machine, the next-generation GigaPan photographic technology that allows viewers to zoom into into large, panoramic photographs to see fine detail, but now it also allows the viewer to watch the full picture or details within it back and forth through time.
"With GigaPan Time Machine, you can simultaneously explore space and time at extremely high resolutions," said Illah Nourbakhsh, associate professor of Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute and head of the CREATE Lab. "Science has always been about narrowing your point of view — selecting a particular experiment or observation that you think might provide insight. But this system enables what we call exhaustive science, capturing huge amounts of data that can then be explored in amazing ways."
The system is an extension of the GigaPan technology developed by the CREATE Lab and NASA, which can capture a mosaic of hundreds or thousands of digital pictures and stitch those frames into a panorama that be interactively explored via computer. To extend GigaPan into the time dimension, image mosaics are repeatedly captured at set intervals, and then stitched across both space and time to create a video in which each frame can be hundreds of millions, or even billions of pixels.
GigaPan Time Machine was developed by Carnegie Mellon University in collaboration with NASA Ames Intelligent Robotics Group and GigaPan Systems, with support from Google.
