What could top David Bergman's Inaugural GigaPan?
posted in Explore Score, GigaPan Images, GigaPan Website and API, GigaPans in the News |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.
I wonder if you could do some sort of flash mob thing to enable this. Get a bunch of people together and have them all dress a certain way or something and go place themselves around a city or an event and then shoot a gigapan of it and have people try to find all the hidden people. You could get super organized and actually have a story line of some sort. If you had a wide enough vantage point for the shot, maybe you could coordinate it and have the pictures taken over a time sequence as someone moves aournd in the field of view out in a city somewhere? Can’t wait to see whatever it is people come up with!