See more: Explore huge GigaPan images of insects and computers here
RANDY SARGENT remembers the first time he explored the surface of Mars. It was 2004, and he was working as a computer scientist at NASA鈥檚 Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. The space agency鈥檚 Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity had just landed on the planet鈥檚 surface, and each rover carried a panoramic camera system designed to take a series of photographs that could be stitched together back on Earth.
鈥淪eeing those panoramas, I was amazed at the sense of being present on Mars,鈥� Sargent says. 鈥淥nce the image is above a certain size it鈥檚 very explorable. Suddenly your navigating skills kick in. You can move around, remember locations and return to them. You lose yourself in it.鈥�
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Along with NASA colleague , Sargent began to wonder if this kind of imaging could enhance virtual exploration on Earth. Together they designed and built a cheap robotic tripod system called that, when fitted with a digital camera, automatically snaps all of the images needed to construct a panorama. 鈥淵ou simply tell the device what area you want to image and it will pan and tilt your camera to cover that image,鈥� he says.
Using image manipulation software such as Photoshop, the photographs can then be stitched together to create a single image that may be over a gigapixel 鈥� a billion pixels 鈥� in size. That鈥檚 big enough to allow the same virtual exploration on a computer screen that Sargent experienced at NASA.
But Sargent and Nourbakhsh, both now at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, are not stopping there. The latest version of the tripod promises to add a new dimension to the experience. It can be programmed to take the same gigapixel panorama over and over again at regular intervals. Stitching software developed by the researchers identifies key features in one of the panoramas and hunts for the same features in the others. The software aligns each gigapixel image to allow seamless navigation between, as well as within, panoramas. 鈥淲e鈥檒l be able to extend the virtual exploring into time,鈥� says Sargent. 鈥淚f you zoom into an image and see a bird鈥檚 nest, now you鈥檒l be able to slide back in time to watch it being built.鈥�
The GigaPan team has . And through a fellowship programme they have put GigaPan rigs in the hands of dozens of researchers who, with different lens set-ups have photographed everything from epic archaeological sites like the ancient city of Petra in Jordan to stunning close-ups of tiger beetles.
鈥淚f you zoom into an image and see a bird鈥檚 nest, you鈥檒l be able to slide back in time to watch it being built鈥�
Peer-reviewed articles utilising the technology are now beginning to appear, and last week the burgeoning community of gigapixel scientists met at Carnegie Mellon for the first .
, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, reckons that using GigaPan to document fossilised organisms could revolutionise vertebrate palaeontology. Documenting a fossil鈥檚 morphology is central to making an accurate description. 鈥淓specially in the case of flattened, morphologically complex fossils, such as the celebrated Berlin specimen of archaeopteryx, a single GigaPan could replace any number of published figures,鈥� Lamanna says. 鈥淚f a picture is worth a thousand words then a GigaPan might be worth hundreds of thousands of words.鈥�
, an archaeologist at Stony Brook University in New York, has found the technology useful for his work on palaeolithic sites in south-west France. As a site is excavated, it is crucial that each artefact found there is recorded in its original spatial context. Careful note-taking and photography are the norm, but Sisk has gone a step further: he builds 3D computer models of each layer of soil as the excavation proceeds. Now, with the aid of the robotic tripod, he can electronically drape a GigaPan image of the relevant layer over the model for virtual exploration at a later date.
鈥淎rchaeology is by its nature a destructive process; we cannot go back after we have excavated a layer,鈥� says Sisk. 鈥淏eing able to refer back with this level of resolution to areas we finished even one or two years ago is invaluable.鈥�
Sargent predicts that this 鈥渢ime machine鈥� gigapixel technology is likely to prove popular not only with researchers like Sisk, but also with laypeople who are interested in the science. Sharing via email is not an option as file sizes can reach into terabyte territory, so the team has built a GigaPan website where users can come together. Here, photographs captured by professional researchers jostle with images snapped by amateur and professional photographers. Since mid-2007, the number of images on the site has climbed to almost 50,000, says , also at Carnegie Mellon University.
For example, at the North Carolina State University Insect Museum has uploaded of some of the drawers in the museum鈥檚 collection. Anyone can zoom into an area of the image and attach a virtual note, and comments by entomologists (鈥淥ne can clearly see diagnostic characters and know that it is the species Bombus pennsylvanicus鈥�) are interspersed with comments left by people who have simply dropped by out of interest (鈥淲hat are these? At first look they looked to me like chocolate chips鈥�).
鈥淣on-scientists are universally fascinated when they visit our collection,鈥� Bertone says. 鈥淒isplaying our specimens on the web seemed like a natural way to reach orders of magnitude more people.鈥�
尝补尘补苍苍补鈥檚 and some of the are online as well.
Sargent and Nourbakhsh鈥檚 former colleagues at NASA have begun using a version of the GigaPan tripod in field tests in Arizona of their . 鈥淭o be able to view an entire crater in one view while being able to zoom in to a particular rock is an enormously useful tool for geologists trying to characterise how the crater was formed,鈥� says at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. 鈥淚 believe it is the logical next step to have a system like GigaPan on future missions.鈥�
Those , too, are available online for public viewing. If images from future space missions are also shared through the GigaPan website, Sargent might find the Martian land surface decidedly more crowded with virtual tourists next time he checks in.
