18-Gigapixel Panorama Offers Breathtaking View of Prague

[The Straight Story]

Exploring a new city is always fun. But if you can’t get there, a gorgeous, zoomable 360-degree view photo can be an acceptable substitute.

360 Cities, a Dutch company, has created a stunning panoramic photo of Prague in the Czech Republic.

“The creation of this image represents my previous five years’ obsession with all things panoramic,” says Jeffrey Martin, founder and CEO of 360 Cities. “If you’re stuck at home over Christmas, feeling humbuggy and don’t feel like hanging out with your family, you can explore Prague instead.”

What makes this panoramic photo interesting to viewers is that you can zoom in and out, move up or down or change your view–much like with Google Street View maps.

The photo has been assembled from 600 shots clicked by a 21-megapixel Canon 5D Mark II camera and a 70-200mm lens, set to 200mm. The camera was mounted on a special robotic device that turned it tiny increments every few hours. The resulting data from the camera was about 40-gigabytes.

The finished Photoshop file is 120 GB. Loading the raw files into a computer and stitching the photo took about a week. Martin used a four year-old Windows PC with two single-core 3 GHz Xeon processors and 8 GB of RAM. He also bought a solid state drive to speed up some tasks.

“The final image exists as a 120 Gigabyte Photoshop large (PSB) file,” says Martin on his blog. It cannot exist as a TIFF or JPEG file because of their size constraints.”



http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/12/panoramic-photo-prague/

[aikoaiko]

1. Even though Prague is expensive now, its still one hell of city.

Thanks for the reminder.