I took a pit stop on the way to Monterey for NMC2009 to grab some GigaPan scenes near Fisherman’s Wharf. What a lovely clear sunny day it was. First was a shot from the beach catching a lot of the crazy cold water swimmers:

Yes, I got myself in the image….

Next, I took the walkway that extends from the end of Van Ness Avenue that curves out into the water, offering two great views – one of the city Skyline:

I have one more (still slowly rendering) looking the other way sweeping from the Golden Gate to Alcatraz.

These ones are not big because it was really worth only 3 rows of images, and the sweeps are wide (about 180 degrees, so there is that warped distortion. Still, the scenes are rich with detail.

I hope to do a few down here in Monterey if there rally is any free time this week (not likely).

Update Here is the last one from the Bridge to the Brig

But by sheer accidental link clicking from my RSS Reader (am I the last person on earth reading feeds while everyone else tweets their lunch?) I found on a neat site (see below) that you can now embed a gigagpan image.. So here goes one I took in November at the foot of the volcano Hekla:

If you are interested in some applications of the gigapan I can think of few finer that the Geology ones by Ron Schott lots of structures and outcrops to study at many different scales.

The thing that got me (linktribution to David Weinberger) here was a blog on Nano Gigapans, where rather than looking at large open scenes, they have gone the opposite way and have set up detailed scenes of very tiny things, like an SEM image of Blood and Hair — this is brilliant, and has me nostalgic for a part time job I had as an undergrad running an SEM (Scanning Electron Microscopy) at a DuPont lab.

Hmmm, I am again inspired to take the rig out…

I captured a few in Shanghai last week, and in one day in Hong Kong, got 3 more scenes:

Top of Peak Tram

Hong Kong Construction Site

View from Pier 9

The effect of exploring the online ones (pan and zoom to incredible detail). There’s a wow factor, as I am getting feedback (and then there is Carl Berger who ran out and got his own).

But I am hoping to see if people can think of some more edu-applicable ways of using this technology. There’s more to it than just shooting the images. I’d suggest that just using the existing images as a base of exploration or study might go a long way.

I had a few varied examples I added as links to the session description for my talk/demo at Learning 2.008. I am somewhat convinced a real power of the tool as when the panos are published on the GigaPan site, any user with an account (free to set up) can mark a detailed area found by zooming/panning as a “snapshot” with comments- essentially annotating a complex piece of information.

There is the capability to explore in detail petroglyphs, castles, gothic cathedrals (and enter inside of it via Google Earth), find content via tags…

So if you look at someone’s profile on GigaPan, it shows all the snapshots they have made on different Gigapans and the ones they have bookmarked– so it can be a “portfolio” per se of explorations across the site. So students can use the site as a way to explore scenes, to say, look across images for landscape forms, architecture to compare, aspects of culture from photos of public places.

The folks who came to my session and “posed” for the demo shot at Shanghai Community International School were even talking about the potential for scripting some “story” to be told by characters placed in or moving around a scene.

I’m more than happy to take and post the images, but there’s much more… and to use this rich resource, you don’t need any equipment, just a clever activity to leverage content and the platform that is there.

Got ideas?

I had a small break Tuesday and wandered down Swantson Street to capture an image of the impressive State Library of Victoria– which always fascniated me with the little bit of Twilight Zone sculpture in front – at least I think it is based on the Time Enough at Last episode with Burgess Meredith:

So I tried first for a shot at the front of the library, but it was right into the sun, and I locked in a really poor exposure setting, and had to tweak images individually. I tried to place myself in the image twice, but was off location, so am there just once:

http://gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=6575

I then set up the rig in front of the library looking across Swantson Street where the light was better, and got this image, which weighs in at 0.47 gigapixels, not even half a gigapan though it was compiled from 112 individual photos:

http://gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=6606

I’m still learning a lot about using the rig, and am thinking more about ways it might be used with the annotation features on the gigapan web site.

Looking forward to taking more photos in Cairns, Brisbane, and Sydney.