GigaPanner

That’s right, just a week after promising availability in April, and twelve days ahead of schedule, the GigaPan EPIC Pro is now available to order.

Also check out Jaime’s scoop on GigaPan.com (English Translation by Google).

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!

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!

There’s a brand new Explore Scoring system live on the GigaPan.org site today. Wow! This is exciting!

Previously the Explore Score was based on a scoring system that counted the cumulative number of tile views that each GigaPan had accumulated. The most viewed GigaPan (most individual tile views) was assigned a maximum score of 1000 and all other GigaPans were assigned an Explore Score proportionate to the champion. As a result the old Explore Score system suffered from a few very popular images whereas the vast majority of GigaPans had an explore score of single digits (many scored 0) out of 1000. Unless you were fortunate enough to have an image featured on the front page or slashdotted it was near impossible to get out of the single digits.

Well all of that has now changed! The new scoring system takes into account many more factors and new GigaPans can register a double digit score much more easily. I don’t know all of the factors that the new system uses (and I don’t expect a full accounting, lest folks try to game the system), but already it feels much more equitable and encouraging for new contributors. It appears there’s no longer a capped maximum score – at the time of this writing the most popular image has an Explore Score of 171.

It will be interesting to delve into the new scoring system and discover how it works. In the meantime, it’s exciting to see a host of fresh popular images.

Time to go exploring…

[8/10/08 Update: Just discovered that the GigaPan Team posted about the new Explore Scores on their 'blog' - no commenting enabled, so it's really more of a syndicated channel for press releases.]

David Holstius over at Gigapan and Blogger Demos has just posted iFrame code that can easily be adapted to embed any GigaPan in your blog or website.

Here’s an example of the code and its output. All you need to do is copy and paste it into your blog or webpage and replace the GigaPan ID and the Snapshot IDs. Simple as that!

<iframe frameborder=”0″ height=”400″ scrolling=”no” width=”600″ src=”http://remix.gigapan.org/unstable/gigapans/7379/snapshots/21010,21011,21012/viewer.html ” ></iframe>