This is freaking cool and taken with an ordinary camera. Zoom it to the max and see people on the Golden Gate...

Fullscreen Gigapan Viewer

kewl

(Busted by the board for a "too short message")

That is cool. It's amazing how it picks up the sea gull flying over Alcatraz. It's not even a dot in the initial view.

Yet another neat invention tested in outer space.

Holy crap.

That is the coolest, and scariest thing I've seen all year.

I wonder how much insurance companies would pay me
as a private eye if I had that camera?

I kinda gave you guys a bum link. You can go to gigapan: GigaPan allows users to upload, share, and explore brilliant gigapixel+ panoramas from around the globe. for the home page or
gigapan: Golden Gate Bridge

To see the San Fran picture with some of the "neat" areas marked, such as the walking pants.

Jason, I'm not sure if it would work because I'm thinking it takes a loooooong time to take all the pictures, depending on how much you zoom in and how big the panorama.

A normal digital camera is mounted on this computer controlled tripod and it takes a pic, moves, takes a pic, moves, over and over until it gets the whole scene. Then it's all stitched together with software.

I'm guessing, unless you have a camera like my Canon Rebel XT, which can take up to 3 shots per second, it could take quite a few minutes to take the whole scene.

Obviously, for the San Fran pic, the camera was WAY zoomed in meaning they took hundreds of pictures to make that one.

Awesome stuff. I was going to sign up to buy one on their beta program but I'm too late.

That's ridiculous.

On a similar note... although not about the technology as much as it is about the privacy issue... is that new google maps feature "street view." By next year it will pretty much have every street in every neighborhood so well photographed, it'll be like watching a video to get directions.

Strange to look up my sister's address and see her car in the driveway... her trunk open... grocery bags on the front porch. Feels very "invasion of privacy-ness" (yeah, I invented the word... jealous?!?!)

Vin,

I don't like Google street view either. My house is clear as day with 2 cars parked in front. And Christmas decorations

luckily for me when they photographed my neighborhood... my street didn't even exist, let alone my house. But I can see my lot when I take the street view for a nearby street.