

Prague from the TV Tower - 18 Gigapixel Panoramic Photo - dabent
http://www.360cities.net/prague-18-gigapixels

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Titanous
From the blog post, it looks like this could be done by anybody with a good
SLR, lens, robot mount, and lots of time.

Also, let the "wtf am I looking at" hunt begin:

<http://i.imgur.com/Ibmo5.jpg> <http://i.imgur.com/Tjxfd.jpg>

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lutorm
Actually, it's not that easy (to do well, at least).

18Gpix with a 9Mpix camera means 2000 exposures. Steady-state shooting rate
for most digital cameras once the buffer is full is about 1 shot/s, so that
means it would take _at least_ half an hour. (And it's doubtful a robot mount
could move that fast.)

During that time, the Sun will move significantly and unless you have a
completely clear sky some clouds will likely move in front of the Sun. You'll
never get a good stitch.

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borism
simple:

many professional cameras (20+ mpix) used by many photographers to take
pictures of their appropriate sections

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jsankey
The best part is that you don't have to look at the tower:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BDi%C5%BEkov_Television_Tow...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BDi%C5%BEkov_Television_Tower)

A communist-era classic.

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vidarh
What? The TV tower is awesome. Especially the crawling baby sculptures..

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borism
absolutely amazing! shame I haven't seen it before

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chanux
26 GigaPixel image <http://www.dresden-26-gigapixels.com/dresden26GP>

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mrduncan
The additional details are pretty interesting also:

About: <http://blog.360cities.net/the-largest-panorama-in-the-world/>

How it was made: [http://blog.360cities.net/prague-18-gigapixels-how-it-was-
ma...](http://blog.360cities.net/prague-18-gigapixels-how-it-was-made/)

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nfnaaron
The buildings are of remarkably uniform height. My guess is either limitation
of building material at the time of greatest construction, or zoning ("cannot
be higher than the church").

Even the modern buildings are mostly low.

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sili
At the same time each building is different in style, something that many US
cities lack.

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thingie
In the center. Outside? Not so much. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panelák>
:-)

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Semiapies
Yes, I was rather startled by the housing-development-writ-large look of much
of the view, as I'd only seen pictures of older Prague architecture before.

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cvg
This could be a great tourism tool. "Hey check out our cool city and its
architecture." Makes me want to visit Prague. Looks like a cool city.

There are a few other cities I would like to see this of.

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ricree
Don't forget about google street view. It doesn't provide the nice bird's eye
view that this does, but there is street level coverage of a good chunk of the
city.

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flipbrad
very impressive! zero obfuscation though...

How long until technology gets to the point where this can all be done in real
time, giving powers that be absolutely insane CCTV monitoring abilities?

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jacobolus
This resolution isn’t coming in real time any time soon (i.e. within the next
10 or 15 years), until we have cameras based on a different optical principle
than a flat sensor with a set of glass lenses in front of it: Using the sizes
of sensors we can currently manufacture for any reasonable kind of price, we
can take a picture of this resolution with each exposure having about a
maximum of about a 20 degree field of view. And since current sensors are not
all that far off of saturating the detail that lenses can resolve, the only
way to improve this will be either to make larger sensors, use arrays of
cameras (or turn the cameras around very quickly), or use some other kind of
optical system. In not too long, I suppose we might be able to capture data
continuously, as a video, and then use software (computationally expensive
fancy math) to increase the resolution beyond that in any particular frame.
But that's still not going to get us close to 18 gigapixel spherical
panoramas.

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Semiapies
Especially considering something like this takes lots of time just to take the
stills. (For instance, on the Dresden panorama linked elsewhere on this page,
if you look along the bridge on the left side, you can see two different
appearances by the same woman cycling.) Real-time at this quality is a _very_
long way away.

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thingie
Is there a reason why the panorama isn't joined cleanly at the closest zoom
level? (Northeast direction, facing Vysočany.) I don't know how hard is it to
make, though.

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dfox
I don't know, but it simply seems weird to see prague for this point. While my
old office is almost across street from my home, it looks incredibly far on
this photo.

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Jupe
Very interesting. Did you notice the dupicate guy?

Look on the left of the circular park in the middle of the round about. The
guy with the knapsack is duplicated.

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KirinDave
There are a ton of stitching errors. I imagine the algorithm chosen was
optimized for time, not for accuracy.

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ryanwaggoner
Pretty incredible stuff. I'm glad they didn't have the treasure hunt clues up
yet or I probably wouldn't have lost the better part of my morning looking at
this.

