GigaPan
Gigapan is short for gigapixel panorama and as it says at www.gigapan.org, “GigaPan allows users to upload, share, and explore brilliant gigapixel+ panoramas from around the globe.” It’s an extension of the idea of image stitching in which several overlapping images are knitted together to create a single image. Software such as Microsoft’s Digital Image Suite makes image stitching a reasonably simple process by putting a easy-to-use front-end on the basic open source panorama tools that can be found here.
The GigaPan approach is more complex and underlies the operation of Google Earth in which the surface of the earth is represented as a mosaic of interconnected images. A person can progressively zoom in on any location on the globe and see ever increasing detail (up to a certain point). Likewise, gigapixel panoramas can be constructed that allow the viewer to explore all aspects of the location in extraordinary detail. The key feature is that the user chooses the aspects and the level of detail as desired. The YouTube video helps explain all of this.
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