Spherical panoramic photography is not new and has been used previously for assembling QTVR and interactive panoramas ’s as well as a means for creating panoramic images by stitching multiple images together. When we began this endeavor it required custom software (made for us by Simeon Basset) to work with such large file sizes. However, recent advances in software and digital camera capabilites have now allowed possible resolutions into the range of gigapixels per single image, thousands of times greater than a standard megapixel still image. Resolutions of over 100,000 pixels in width are now possible with certain techniques. The resulting gigapixel image is one that has a tremendous range of detail contained, allowing unsurpassed viewing and exploration. What this ultimately allows for are large prints that show no softening or degradation from size, and allowing intricate detail to be revealed at close inspection. This can create a stunned reaction from viewers, who have never seen resolution expressed at such a scale. In addition, when the image is imported into a 3d animation package, it can be combined with modeled terrain data, which provides a wide range of latitude for the creation of digital backgrounds in visual effects work.

The equipment required to shoot spherical panoramic imagery has typically been the use of a simple panoramic nodal head, which is manually turned to dozens of preset shooting positions, covering every possible angle within a sphere of the camera. Gigapixel level work, however, requires many hundreds of shots to be taken and demands the use of an automated motion control head which has the precision (and patience) to execute the large amount of overlapping images. The resulting shots are then stitched together in dedicated software, often taking many days of uninterrupted processing for a single image to be assembled.

Another option versus shooting spherically is to shoot a narrow field-of-view similar to the coverage of a standard lens, but instead sub-dividing it into hundreds of overlapping images by using a longer telephoto lens. This results in an even higher pixel-per-degree density, and allows the highest resolution afforded to an image.