GigaPanner

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.

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.]