Robot tripod takes impressive panoramas

At the SIGGRAPH graphics conference in Los Angeles I got the chance to look at GigaPan, a robotic tripod (pictured below) that lets photographers produce impressively large panoramas at the touch of a button.

Check out the snowscape from Colorado above, taken by Jason Buchheim. Zoom in and you will appreciate how much detail GigaPan can capture. The image contains 1.91 gigapixels stitched together from 19 separate snapshots. A gigapixel is 1 billion pixels.

Producing a GigaPan image is easy. The user clamps their camera to the tripod. After a bit of calibration they simply point it at the top left and lower right hand corner of the panorama they want to photograph and the tripod does the rest, taking a series of snaps that can then be stitched together to create the panorama. The tripod is as low tech as it sounds - it even has a robotic arm to mechanically operate the shutter.

The largest panorama yet weighs in at 6 gigapixels, snapped by a botanist in Hawaii.

The good news is that GigaPan should be commercially available soon. There's already a 2-3 month waiting list, but if you can stand to wait till the end of the year, a GigaPan tripod can be yours for around US$400.