Eye-popping photographic technology a peeping Tom will love
Arrive at this site and you’ll see a gorgeous photo of a dozen condominium towers stretched across the Vancouver skyline, yachts docked in the foreground, dusk bathing the scene in a rich blue hue.
After admiring the shot for a moment, play around with the buttons in the upper left-hand corner: zoom-in, zoom out; pan right, pan left.
Now really zoom in and give the page a few seconds to reload.
Holy gigapixels, you’re right in somebody’s living room … or bedroom. (Fear not, it’s all safe for work, near as I can tell.)
Feel creepy?
You’re welcome.
The company, located in Vancouver, is called Gigapixel Photography. Here’s a bit of their FAQ page:
A gigapixel image is a digital image composed of more than one billion pixels. It contains more than 150 times the detail captured by a typical 6-megapixel consumer camera.
Gigapixel images are created by tiling a large number of photographs, or scanning a large film negative (8″ x 10″). Gigapixel images are displayed on-line using streaming technology which breaks the image into small tiles and loads them as you look. This allows you instantly view high-resolution images that are over several gigabytes in size.
Gigapixel photographs are ideal for tourism, real-estate, architecture, medical imaging, archiving, and documenting special events. High-resolution images create the impression of “being there” by immersing the viewer within the scene.
Not a word about voyeurism, but I’m guessing they spent many an hour scouring every lighted room on that photograph — there are hundreds — lest “being there” include capturing a Vancouverite (or two) in a compromising position. For example — hey, this is my job! — check out the room with the reddish light at the very top of the tallest tower on the right-hand side of the photo; zoom in all the way and you’ll see a couple apparently … dining.
Google Street View has already blazed this trail, of course, but Gigapixel is taking it to new heights — literally.
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