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Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with scientists at NASA's Ames Research Center, have built a low-cost robotic device that enables any digital camera to produce breathtaking gigapixel — billions of pixels — panoramas called GigaPans.

The hardware technology enabling GigaPan images is a robotic camera mount, jointly designed and manufactured by Charmed Labs of Austin Texas. This mount attaches to any digital camera and enables shooting interactive panoramas that can be explored in great depth on the Internet.
The tripod-like mount makes it possible for a digital camera to take hundreds of overlapping images of landscapes, buildings or rooms. Then, using software developed by Carnegie Mellon and Ames, these images can be arranged in a grid and digitally stitched together into a single image that may comprise tens of billions of pixels. Anyone using Google Earth can now fly into these GigaPan panoramas in the context of exploring the world.

Illah Nourbakhsh, associate professor at the Carnegie-Mellon School of Computer Science's Robotics Institute and Randy Sargent, a senior systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon West in Moffett Field, Calif., led GigaPan's development.

Sargent got the idea for GigaPan when he was a technical staff member at Ames Research Center, helping to develop software for combining images from NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers into panoramas. Sargent sees the GigaPan system as an important tool for ecologists, biologists, and other scientists. In cooperation with Google, the researchers also have created a GigaPan layer on Google Earth. Anyone using Google Earth can now fly into these GigaPan panoramas in the context of exploring the world.

To promote further sharing of the imagery, Carnegie Mellon has launched a Website where one can upload and interactively explore panoramic images of any format. Visit the site at: http://link.abpi.net/l.php?20071001A2.