GigaPan Systems is a global, privately held technology company that provides hardware, software, and services to create and share high-resolution, interactive
gigapixel
A gigapixel image is a digital image bitmap composed of one billion (109) pixels (picture elements), 1000 times the information captured by a 1 megapixel digital camera. A square image of 31,623 pixels in width and height is one gigapixel. Cur ...
panoramic images. The company is headquartered in
Portland, Oregon
Portland (, ) is a port city in the Pacific Northwest and the largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon. Situated at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, Portland is the county seat of Multnomah County, the most populous co ...
.
History
GigaPan Systems was founded in 2008 as a collaborative project between
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...
and
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research.
NASA was established in 1958, succeeding t ...
’s
Ames Research Center
The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) laborat ...
with support from
Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
. The original GigaPan robotic hardware and related software were devised for NASA's Mars
Spirit
Spirit or spirits may refer to:
Liquor and other volatile liquids
* Spirits, a.k.a. liquor, distilled alcoholic drinks
* Spirit or tincture, an extract of plant or animal material dissolved in ethanol
* Volatile (especially flammable) liquids, ...
and
Opportunity
Opportunity may refer to:
Places
* Opportunity, Montana, an unincorporated community, United States
* Opportunity, Nebraska, an unincorporated community, United States
* Opportunity, Washington, a former census-designated place, United States
* 3 ...
Rovers, to capture high-definition panoramas of Mars. The development team was led by Randy Sargent, a senior systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon West and the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and Illah Nourbakhsh, associate professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh.
The project has since grown into an independent company offering solutions for capturing gigapixel images.
Technology
GigaPan Systems combines high-definition images and panoramas with sharing, tagging and zooming capabilities. The company offers a solution for shooting, viewing and exploring high-resolution gigapixel images in a single system. The GigaPan system includes:
*Robotic Camera Mounts: The EPIC series of robotic camera mounts can capture HD, gigapixel photos using almost any digital camera. By setting the upper left and lower right corners of the panorama desired, the EPIC works out how many photos the camera will need to take, and then automatically organizes them into rows or columns.
*GigaPan Stitch Software: GigaPan's
image stitching
Image stitching or photo stitching is the process of combining multiple photographic images with overlapping fields of view to produce a segmented panorama or high-resolution image. Commonly performed through the use of computer software, most app ...
technology automatically combines the hundreds or thousands of images taken with a digital camera using the GigaPan EPIC series into a single image. The software is available for both Mac and Windows.
*GigaPan Viewer: Lets people view images on GigaPan.com or on a third-party website using the GigaPan free, standalone viewer application.
*GigaTag: Allows users to share photos and tag themselves on Facebook within the gigapixel images
See also
*
Gigapixel image
A gigapixel image is a digital image bitmap composed of one billion (109) pixels (picture elements), 1000 times the information captured by a 1 megapixel digital camera. A square image of 31,623 pixels in width and height is one gigapixel. Cu ...
*
High-resolution high-definition
HRHD (high-resolution high-definition) (also HR, HRHDTV, or HR.HDTV) is an initialism referring to an image resolution derived from high-definition video, often seen as part of the filename of TV shows shared on the Internet. HRHD is an unofficial ...
*
Panorama
A panorama (formed from Greek πᾶν "all" + ὅραμα "view") is any wide-angle view or representation of a physical space, whether in painting, drawing, photography, film, seismic images, or 3D modeling. The word was originally coined in ...
*
Panorama photography
Panoramic photography is a technique of photography, using specialized equipment or software, that captures images with horizontally elongated fields of view. It is sometimes known as ''wide format photography''. The term has also been applied to ...
References
External links
*{{Official website
How It’s DoneNational Geographic - Space Panoramas
Ames Research Center
Carnegie Mellon University
Photography equipment
Panorama photography
Robotics projects