Microsoft Wants the Big Picture
location based services
While several sources describe the company's efforts to create a 10-gigpixel image Microsoft will hold a press conference today about its acquisition of Vexcel a few months back.
An 4-gigapixel image was created of Seattle, and unlike satellite images, is oblique, a "more natural" angle than orthos. The image was built from 800 individual images, taken over an hour and a half. The big leap here, apparently, is the software to elegantly knit the images together. Once you have several images of that size, they "could be woven together to form a 3D-like photograph consisting of tens of billions of pixels" says one article, citing Microsoft Researcher Cohen.
Technology Review also looks at this work and notes its goal is to enhance existing Birds Eye View imagery in Live Local. That imagery is from Pictometry, and the big limitation is that you can't seamlessly fly through it; you must load one image after another. With high resolution, large area obliques such as those Microsoft is testing, Pictometry licensing could be lessened or dropped down the road.
How this project dubbed Big Panorama and Microsoft's acquisition of GeoTango late last year fit together is still unclear.
An 4-gigapixel image was created of Seattle, and unlike satellite images, is oblique, a "more natural" angle than orthos. The image was built from 800 individual images, taken over an hour and a half. The big leap here, apparently, is the software to elegantly knit the images together. Once you have several images of that size, they "could be woven together to form a 3D-like photograph consisting of tens of billions of pixels" says one article, citing Microsoft Researcher Cohen.
Technology Review also looks at this work and notes its goal is to enhance existing Birds Eye View imagery in Live Local. That imagery is from Pictometry, and the big limitation is that you can't seamlessly fly through it; you must load one image after another. With high resolution, large area obliques such as those Microsoft is testing, Pictometry licensing could be lessened or dropped down the road.
How this project dubbed Big Panorama and Microsoft's acquisition of GeoTango late last year fit together is still unclear.
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By coincidence, the Gigapxl Project at http://gigapxl.org/ counts Michael T. Jones, CTO of Google Earth as one of the three team members.
They start with film rather than digital, then turn the images into digital gigapixel files.
#1 Allan Doyle (Link) on 2006-05-05 08:0
They start with film rather than digital, then turn the images into digital gigapixel files.
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