GigaPanner

First there was the Beta, then in January the Epic, and finally in April the Epic 100. How soon until the release of the long awaited/rumored GigaPan Epic Pro? Your guess is as good as mine, but I think we can finally see it’s not just vaporware…

To wit: Exhibit A and Exhibit B. It also shows up in the background and foreground of some of the other photos in this Flickr set. You can’t see much, but one thing that should please many is that it has two arms for support of the camera tray rather than just the one on the previous models. No more jagged edges…

On Sunday I had the rather unique and wholly enjoyable experience of visiting the TWiT Cottage in Petaluma, CA for the taping of an episode of This Week in Tech (TWiT #207). Needless to say, I brought along my GigaPan rig and Leo Laporte was gracious enough to give me the opportunity to demonstrate how it works on air. Fellow GigaPanner Mike Hellers (@mikehellers) was in the audience and had the wherewithal to record my 15 minutes of fame to YouTube:

After the show I shot a 360 degree GigaPan of the TWiT studio from Leo’s perspective.

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With the release of Silverlight3, there’s a new way to embed GigaPans into a web page. I still get a bit confused by Microsoft’s usage of Silverlight Deep Zoom and HD View, but in any case they’ve got an product (or pair of them) that has some interesting features for the GigaPanner. Have a look:

This is another iFrame solution to embedding photos in a blog, so it won’t work for those using Wordpress.com hosted blogs, but if you’re hosting your own Wordpress.org blog or using other blogging software that allows iFrame embeds, this solution might work well for you.

One important thing to note: If you try to cut and paste the URL from GigaPan’s “View in Google Earth 4.2+” link below a geolocated GigaPan into the HD View Preview utility it won’t work. You’ll need to take the URL that you cut and paste and append “&nonl=1″ (minus the quotes) to the end of the URL. Why? Beats me, but I followed the examples they gave in the right hand sidebar to figure this out.

[Update: Well it looked good on their site, but apparently Wordpress doesn't like it on my site. I just upgraded my servers, so it may be a configuration issue on my end. I'll keep investigating...]

[Update #2: It works now! Thanks to Eric Stollnitz for his assistance.]

Okay, now this in not exactly what I’d call a time-lapse GigaPan (ask Randy Sargent about those) but this is an innovative use of the GigaPan robot to capture time-lapse sequences, as pioneered by Stoney Vintson of GigaPan Systems.

Want to join a growing project? GigaPan is set to explode and is looking to beef up its staff with a couple of full time software developers. I’ve been making feature requests for months now and the current team just cannot keep up with the explosive growth of the website. The team sees the huge opportunity for growth and is now looking for a few good programmers. There are two job postings I’m aware of:

• Full-time software engineers to join the core development team of the website
  and the panorama stitching application
• Geospatial Software Architect

Here are some of the skills they’re seeking:

GigaPan web site skills:
Strong web development background
Django experience is strongly preferred
Javascript, DOM, AJAX, database and Linux experience
PHP, Actionscript 2.0 / 3.0 and Flash experience is a plus
JSON-based Web API use/design (GData, Maps etc.)
Software QA processes

GigaPan stitching and image processing software:
Strong C++ experience
Comfort with mathematics and image processing
MacOS and Windows development experience
Qt user interface experience is a plus
Software QA processes

The upside is huge. GigaPan is marketing an affordable system that turns consumer digital cameras into Gigapixel capable devices! The project is committed to open standards and working hard to realize the full promise of these remarkable images.

Send your CV to illah@cmu.edu and randy.sargent@west.cmu.edu. Please help them out if you can!

Sadly I don’t have a GigaPan of Darwin or any of the Galapagos Islands, but at least I can honor Mr. Lincoln’s birthday with a GigaPan…

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Happy Birthday to two giants of history!

I find it hard to imagine a future GigaPan image that’s going to draw the attention and interaction to match David Bergman’s Inaugural GigaPan.

No doubt, as more and more people own their own GigaPans robots, or have friends or family who do, the traffic to the GigaPan.org website will continually increase over time, thereby generating more attention, snapshots, and comments for any popular GigaPan. At the same time, it’s doubtful that any single GigaPan will ever have the same novelty for so many people. What’s more, because GigaPans are unlikely to capture instantaneous news events because of the nature of how they’re captured and stitched, it’s unlikely that they will ever compete with single shot photos or video for capturing breaking events or things that happen very suddenly or spontaneously – the sort of image that is likely to generate an overwhelming traffic spike. I have a hard time imagining an event that would be conducive to GigaPanning that would simultaneously combine the novelty, widespread popular appeal, and explorability of Bergman’s Inaugural GigaPan, though I’d love to be proven wrong.

So with those caveats in mind, I put the following question to the community of GigaPanners: What do you imagine will be the characteristics of the first GigaPan to match or surpass David Bergman’s Inaugural GigaPan in popularity?

And since I’ve thought about this a bit, myself, I’ll let you in on my own speculation.

The odds that someone will prove me wrong and use a GigaPan to capture some breaking news event in a way that is both immediate and explorable seem long, but this type of GigaPan may well be within the capability of the technology in years to come. Still, my speculation is that it will not be an unaltered reality/news GigaPan that first knocks David Bergman’s Inaugural GigaPan from the top spot.

I think the one to do it will use a GigaPan (or a series of GigaPans) the way Kit Williams used the childrens book Masquerade to combine artistry and a good old fashioned treasure hunt to inspire millions to visit the site again and again, dissecting the GigaPans in detail and putting together clues over many weeks or months, and generating lots of global conversation and collaboration along the way.

I’m certainly not artistic enough to put this together myself, but if there’s an artist out there who thinks s/he’s up to the challenge, I’ve got a couple of ideas about how to make GigaPan technology a central feature of a puzzle like this. Contact me if you’re interested.

Berti and I have been busy coding for the last few days.

Although I couldn’t incorporate it into this blog post, we’ve created a standalone webpage that uses JavaScript to animate a Guided Tour of a GigaPan image. Click on Berti to have a look…

As with our earlier “Poor Man’s Zoom Loop”, the page makes use of code from both the GigaPan.org front page and orbitlab’s hack of the snapshot viewer. It’s all coded in JavaScript so you can “View Source”, copy, paste, and hack it to your heart’s content. There are undoubtedly more elegant ways of coding this, but we’ve opted for function over form.

Berti and I would certainly love to hear about it if you make use of this code in your own website.

Happy Hacking!

Although it had escaped my notice until today (when it first showed up in a Google Blog Search), it appears that the GigaPan team is once again maintaining a blog (of sorts).

I say once again because I’ve been told that in the early days of the GigaPan.org site there was a blog linked from the bottom of the homepage, however that blog apparently disappeared soon thereafter and hasn’t been seen since…

Until this past Monday, that is! The link at the bottom of the GigaPan.org page is back and the official GigaPan Blog is live at blogspot.com. Subscribed!!!

It’s good to see the GigaPan Team using a ‘blog’ as an official communications channel, but it’s really more of a syndicated press release space than a blog in its current incarnation since it doesn’t allow comments. Still, one-way communication from the team is a step in the right direction.

Want to join the converstation? Comments are open here at GigaPanner.com and you can always start your own blog. I’d love to hear from you!