GigaPanner

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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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.

It seems that the NY Times article has made CrunchGear sit up and notice GigaPan, too. Remarkably though, they can’t even get the link to the GigaPan.org site right. D’oh!

In the Technology section of today’s NY Times is an article by Anne Eisenberg about GigaPans and the GigaPan robot entitled: Sweeping Panoramas, Courtesy of a Robot. The article does a very nice job of introducing the capabilities of the robot and hints at the joys of shooting and viewing GigaPan photography. It’s a great introduction to the technology for those who aren’t already familiar with it, and the Times deserves credit for using their website to embed an actual GigaPan photo with the article – something that you just can’t experience in the print version of the paper.

(Unfortunately their web team was not so successful in linking from the online story to a GigaPan user page [Full disclosure: I was interviewed for the article and that is my user page] and another GigaPan image of Hanauma Bay by Richard Palmer.)