Zoom Through Time & Space with New Photo 'Time Machine'
Zooming in and out of computer images and video is nothing new. But what about panning through time with images composed of a billion pixels?
Called GigaPan Time Machine, this new computer program stitches together thousands of images taken at a series of intervals to create a high-resolution picture containing the time data as well as the image data. When looking at the assembled picture, users can zoom in through time as well as space.
GigaPan Time Machine gives scientists, as well as the general public, a new way to engage and explore imagery, said Randy Sargent, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University.
You take those hundred pictures and then load them into your computer and then run computer software that we created to turn those hundred pictures into one seamless mosaic , one seamless billion-pixel picture, Sargent told InnovationNewsDaily. That's how GigaPan, which is an older technology, can create a picture with a billion pixels using just an ordinary digital camera.
So far, Sargent has created five different time-spanning pictures, including images of plants as they grow and flower, the universe as it goes through nine billion years of evolution forming black holes, galaxies and stars, and a Carnegie Mellon University carnival as it's built and then taken down.
These five scenes are just a preview of what's to come. Soon the GigaPan Time Machine website will allow users to upload their images and create their own panoramic experiences, which the researchers hope will be shared with other users. This capability will be available sometime this year.
Right now, we have the GigaPan cameras that can take the panorama every 10 minutes or 15 minutes but they're some processes that are too fast for that , Sargent said. What we really want to do is speed up that process to the point where perhaps instead of every 10 minutes it's every second we're taking a billion-pixel picture or even some day perhaps we'll have a full video camera that takes 24 frames a second at a billion pixels.
-
10 Innovative Nature Movie Technologies
-
Fastest-Ever Movies Could Capture Molecular Movement
-
10 Technologies Poised to Transform our World
