Bringing Mars Rover Technology to Earth
GigaPan Systems was established in 2008 as a commercial spin-off of a successful collaboration between researchers at NASA and Carnegie Mellon University that developed the breakthrough GigaPan System for creating high-resolution panoramic images. GigaPan Systems was founded to bring this powerful, high-resolution imaging capability to a broad audience.
A New Dimension for Photography
The GigaPan System allows experienced and novice photographers to create high-resolution panorama images more easily than ever before and the resulting GigaPan images offer viewers a new, unique perspective on the world. The GigaPan System is the first solution that offers everything needed to take high-resolution panoramic images in a single system: the robotic GigaPan Imager attachment for most digital cameras; the GigaPan Stitch Software software that automatically combines the thousands of images taken into a single image, and the GigaPan Viewer on the GigaPan.com site that enables the unique mega-high resolution viewing experience.
Development Team
The GigaPan Imager uses the same panoramic photo technology as the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, used to collect amazing panoramic images of Mars. The original GigaPan Imager prototype and related software were devised by a team led by Randy Sargent, a senior systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon West and the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and Illah Nourbakhsh, an associate professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh.
Who´s Getting the Bigger Picture with GigaPan?
The GigaPan System was originally used as part of a cultural exchange program, Global Connection Project, a collaboration of scientists from Carnegie Mellon University, Google Inc., and the National Geographic Society which aims to help connect communities and peoples around the globe through images. Many of these images are available for viewing online with the unique GigaPan viewer, at the GigaPan sharing community, www.gigapan.com. The GigaPan System makes it easy and fun for experienced and novice photographers to get the bigger picture and share these high resolution images with others. GigaPan images are fun to share with family and friends near or far. For students and researchers, GigaPan images are a great way to present high-impact, visual information. GigaPan images also have tremendous power for business. For example in tourism and real estate, companies can use beautiful GigaPan images of their locations to allow customers to explore them online. GigaPan images are already used by the following:
- SportsIllustrated.com
- Golf.com
- Google Earth
