Ultra Zoom
An ordinary camera and an extraordinary technology create billion-pixel images that allow viewers to virtually fly deep into an image and explore nature in stunning detail
The North Carolina State University Insect Museum is using GigaPan technology to allow anyone with an Internet connection to dive deep into its 2,700 drawers of over 1.5 million specimens. Photo courtesy of Matthew Bertone and Andrew Deans
When NASA’s twin Mars rovers began sending detailed pictures to Earth in January 2004, Randy Sargent, a computer scientist working on visualizations of those images, was enthralled by the sense of actually exploring Martian terrain. Onboard each rover, a camera known as the Pancam swiveled and tilted on command from NASA scientists. Sargent and his colleagues combined each exposure into a stunning digital panorama of the Red Planet’s landscape. Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, could interact with the images on their computer screens, zoom in on fine details, hypothesize about what they were seeing, and pick the rovers’ next destinations. “The pan had so much resolution, it felt like peering through a little hole in the wall into another world,” recalls Sargent’s manager, robotics group leader Illah Nourbakhsh at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California, who was then on sabbatical from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “What stunned us was this feeling of presence, which a simple picture that is not interactive doesn’t give you.”
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