While in Scandinavia in 2010, I had the opportunity to utilize a new, CMU developed tool to document my surroundings in incredible detail. The GigaPan uses stepper motors to automatically swivel a camera and capture a grid of photos that are combined in software to form a high resolution composite image, ultimately hosted online.
My colleague Lito Karatsoli-Chanikian and I used this tool to capture over 50 panoramas of nature, architecture, and daily life. We used this tool to augment our understanding of new spaces by increasing and decreasing scalar relationships in perspective. Upon returning home, we were invited to speak at the Fine International Conference on Gigapixel Imaging to guests from NASA, Kodak, and HP, held at Carnegie Mellon University in November 2010. I lectured on how to utilize the Gigapan to help document cities and their otherwise unnoticed architectural details.
The rest of our work can be seen here in its entirety. Below are several sample images from our trip: (click to see the full resolution image)