New Scientist
Image: fourchambers
Randy Sargent remembers the first time he explored the surface of Mars. It was 2004, and he was working as a computer scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. The space agency’s Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity had just landed on the planet’s surface, and each rover carried a panoramic camera system designed to take a series of photographs that could be stitched together back on Earth.
“Seeing those panoramas, I was amazed at the sense of being present on Mars,” Sargent says. “Once the image is above a certain size it’s very explorable. Suddenly your navigating skills kick in. You can move around, remember locations and return to them. You lose yourself in it.”
Along with NASA colleague Illah Nourbakhsh, Sargent began to wonder if this kind of imaging could enhance virtual exploration on Earth. Together they designed and built a cheap robotic tripod system called GigaPan that, when fitted with a digital camera, automatically snaps all of the images needed to construct a panorama. “You simply tell the device what area you want to image and it will pan and tilt your camera to cover that image,” he says.
Using image manipulation software such as Photoshop, the photographs can then be stitched together to create a single image that may be over a gigapixel – a billion pixels – in size. That’s big enough to allow the same virtual exploration on a computer screen that Sargent experienced at NASA. Read more…
