Coming: High-resolution, gigapixel photos

A panorama of the Harmandir Sahib, informally referred to as The Golden Temple or Temple of God, in Amritsar, India, taken with the GigaPan camera system. (Readers with Flash: Zoom in and explore the image using the tools above.) Credit: Matt Deans.

NY Times: Sweeping Panoramas, Courtesy of a Robot. Excerpt:

A new, inexpensive robotic device from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University attaches snugly to almost any standard digital camera, tilting and panning it to fashion highly detailed panoramic vistas — whether of the Grand Canyon, a rain forest or a backyard Easter egg hunt. The robot is called GigaPan, named “giga” for the billion or more pixels it can marshal for a typical panorama. It creates the huge, high-resolution vista by extending its robotic finger and repeatedly clicking the camera shutter, taking tens, hundreds or even thousands of overlapping images, each at a slightly different angle, that are then stitched together by software to create one gigapixel shot.

Awesome. Can’t wait for this to hit the consumer camera marketplace.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.