Dubai in 45 gigapixels | Hacker News Reader

Dubai in 45 gigapixels

gigapan.org

42 pointslocopati14 comments

Posted because it's an interesting picture technically, because it's bizarre (to me) to see a city like this in a desert (yes, Vegas is bizarre too), because zooming in, it's almost impossible to see people (contrast with any major NA/European/Chinese city).

I've lived in both places. Dubai for 3 years, then 2 years in LV and then back to Dubai for another year. The similarities in the urban landscape are worth noting. Sheik Zayed highway is just like the Strip - highrises on both sides, behind which are parking garages, behind which are one to four storey buildings and then the desert . . .

Stories about Dubai and Detroit are fascinating to me, because they are a kind of "fall of civilization" bizarre..

These two metropolises make an interesting point of comparison.

Detroit built up in response to a titanic industry it thought would never go away, and had no plan in place for when it did. Dubai built up in anticipation of becoming an international hub for business, but had no plan in place for when it failed to happen.

Zoom all the way in. The quality is so bad, you can downsample it by the factor of 2 (or maybe even 4) without any detail loss, (which reduces the number of pixels by the factor of 4, or 16 respectively). So it's really a 3-10 gigapixel panorama.

Also notice ugly vertical stripes in the sky area. I'm not sure what caused that.

I think that's the biggest image of this kind I've ever seen.

The details are astonishing (I could see the plate number of a bus that was not even visible at first), but I found the visualization software subpar. Zooming in or out would just black the picture sometimes while loading the new tiles and the scroll wheel would zoom in the center of the screen instead of the mouse position.

The Paris one was done a lot better, imho.

Reminds me of a Star Wars (non-classic, CGI) set. My favorite Dubai photo 'Foggy Dubai'.

Real-life castles in the clouds.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/playing-with-light/2399114248/i...

I'd never realized how enormous the Burj Dubai is.

I was recently in Dubai and they had pictures of it superimposed in cities around the world. Check out how massive it would be if it were in San Francisco: http://www.flickr.com/photos/steven_maher/4444617588/

That's amazing.

A supercar parked up there! http://gigapan.org/gigapans/48492/snapshots/137629/

There doesn't seem to be any people in this city...is this a side effect of a very, very long exposure or something?

some of the immediate buildings to the right (whitish) have a strange bloated imperfection. kinda ruins the picture.

Zooming back is great as you really see that new skyscraper. Zooming in is pretty good too.

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