Shanghai City in panoramic view in 195 gigapixels | Hacker News Reader

Shanghai City in panoramic view in 195 gigapixels

sh-meet.bigpixel.cn

256 pointslearnaholic86 comments

By looking at the river you can notice a moiré pattern with lines both horizontal and vertical to the camera, although the vertical lines are more apparent. I figure these would be either artifacts from the stitching process, or limitations of the lens itself. The effect also correlates in size and shape with out of focus areas, which can likewise be found in the river, signaling that it is indeed an artifact caused by the panorama.

I guess you can take this as an exercise for the future when you can't quite figure out whether you are stuck in a virtual reality or not.

When you clear the cache or visit the site for the first time and zoom in, you can see the tiles load. These lines are at the stiching borders, and coming from the stiching algorithm.

Lens/sensor limit moire looks very different when compared to this.

Prototype concept car spotted:

https://imgur.com/a/LhAyUF9

Haha, I don’t know what I was expecting but that made me chuckle.

I wonder if anyone’s put together a collection of amusing “inadvertent Photoshops” from botched panorama stitching.

Nothing I’ve seen yet tops this specimen of neural net weirdness:

https://i.imgur.com/60fTgCg

That is awesome. Maybe even frameworthy.

Police officers contemplating ice cream, the simple things in life

https://imgur.com/a/0jF5JzN

Find this toilet paper

https://imgur.com/a/GTnzYvo

https://imgur.com/a/NCPHqIr

that was quick

Am I the only one who gets a "FATAL ERROR: 404" message? I tried from different browsers on different devices. Wonder if they just block some countries?

Just checked, and it's down for me now (Bay area, California) whereas it was up earlier. Looks like Gigapan is down, too.

Works fine. Latest Chrome. Europe.

Try adding a ? at the end of the url, for some reason that makes it work for me

that worked.

Probably the CDN was dead. With ? in the end you invalidate the cache and goes directly to the backend server.

That's incredible. If you zoom in on the tippy top of huge building under construction across the river and then follow the crane cable down to the hook, you can see a construction worker in sufficient detail that you can tell what clothes he's wearing.

It's like one of those cop show computer lab scenes where the detectives find a vital clue from a witness' blurry 5 megapixel cell phone photo.

"Wait a minute. Why didn't I see it earlier? Zoom and enhance on that smudge!"

That is the most performant and responsive panorama I have ever seen!

It really puts map websites loading for around a second or more after panning/zooming into perspective.

It really does!

The next generation of where’s Waldo is going to be incredible

It's interesting seeing how they dealt with moving objects like the boats.

If you scan anti-clockwise until the river is hidden behind the buildings you should see two tour boats with "China Bohai Bank" on the side. One appears to be pulling in and one pull out. If you look at the passengers - it's actually the same boat. If you follow the river clockwise, you'll see two barges carrying dark material. Again, these are the same boat.

I could be mistaken, but it seems in both cases that some 'manual effort' would have been involved to make the picture look natural by placing the duplicates slightly out of position as if they were two individual boats.

People too, unless this lady has an identical twin with the same umbrella https://imgur.com/NQ5keHY

I haven't seen any ugly merges between the frames yet, but they can't have been done manually

https://imgur.com/a/hgBdkJJ

This one looks a bit dodgy

Nah, that's just how it looks there.

Why would that be manual and not an artifact of movement between snapshots? If it were manual effort,why wouldn't they erase a duplicate?

Look at the barges I mentioned (https://imgur.com/a/ZNaLCuO). Clearly this specific case isn't an automatic stitching of photos. We must agree that there is only one barge and, though not copied, one instance of the boat has been moved out of line from the other. It would look ugly otherwise.

> Why wouldn't they erase a duplicate?

This I don't have a good reason for, which is why i thought this was curious

> Why wouldn't they erase a duplicate?

IMHO to make the scene look more dynamic.

>* some 'manual effort' would have been involved to make the picture look natural...*

????

Of course.

You take these photos by mounting a dSLR on what is essentially a programmable tripod type thingy. It takes a series of photos, and all the images are stitched together in software. Depending on the software used, the algorithms will place things differently. Using different software to stitch the mosaic would result in, (probably), different artifacts in the final image.

https://imgur.com/a/g7DoUwg

http://www.jeffrey-martin.com/london-skyline-panorama-2

How are pictures like these taken? What kind of equipment would you need?

They are shot with a dSLR and a very long lens. This one was likely shot with a 300mm lens. The camera is mounted on a programmable robot, and a mosaic of photos is created. They are then stitched together with software such as PTGui or kolor Autopano Giga. I've shot a number of images like this, in fact some of them over 4x bigger than this one. My largest one, of Prague, was released 2 weeks ago: http://360gigapixels.com/prague_gigapixel_panorama_900K_2018....

you can see more about my gigapixel images here: http://www.jeffrey-martin.com/gigapixel-photography

Prague link fix: http://360gigapixels.com/prague_gigapixel_panorama_900K_2018...

How long it takes for robot to take all the pictures and how many pictures there is?

Prague was 3 hours per dataset. I was there for 3 days in the cold and rain, shooting multiple datasets, from 8am to 4pm last year in November.

Wonderful pictures. The 360 views really help capture the feel of the city. Wish there was a way to fix the black hole at the bottom, though.

Sure there is, you can paste a satellite photo of the ground where you shot the photo from ;-)

Thank you for the amazing works.

There is a type in the copyright footer on your website, it states (c) 1066 - 2019

I was around since the Battle of Hastings actually, so it's not a typo.

Thank you for noticing ;)

Phenomenal. Can clearly read the text on the billboards on the tennis court. "Twosome apply together second enjoy discount".

I think we hugged it to death based on the 404... :(

There's a lot to explore. I love that circular crosswalk. It also makes me smile to see the potted houseplants on the blue-roofed barge. Can't quite read the QR codes on the Disney fence, though.

Better version: http://www.bigpixel.cn/t/5834170785f26b37002af46d

And from the other side of the river: http://www.bigpixel.cn/t/57ecedae64b1bf2050ab00c1

Find the ghost: https://ibb.co/1bkxxG6

You can see the amphibious warfare ship, Wuzhi Shan, being fitted out at the Hudong–Zhonghua shipyard.

I spy Mickey mouse

Or the two action hero kids + two cool parents

https://screenshots.firefox.com/JFHWK8P7YT19BaEK/sh-meet.big...

https://photos.app.goo.gl/kc3vGpHfX8HRoenH8

Top of the HSBC building.

I'm really surprised by how few people there are walking around on the street. You can see the people on the observation deck of World Financial Tower pretty clearly though.

This is my favorite photo now. I can relate my recent trip to Shanghai now. But these photos are very old I think because I'm missing tower inside the lawns of Disney store.

Person without a head https://photos.app.goo.gl/RyP2dwJ13S2Lv6Zh9

I sadly get:

This site can’t be reached. sh-meet.bigpixel.cn’s server IP address could not be found.

I'm using CloudFlare DNS.

Maybe you have to check your networking setting. It works well here.

I had similar issue. If you had adblock on, turning it off helped me.

The streets seem quite empty btw

Let's look into others' perceived privacy from a viewpoint several km away.

you have no expectation of privacy in a public place, even when you're NOT in China.

Being IN China (should be clear from comment history, don't understand that capitalisation of 'NOT'), I do indeed get the idea a public space is a public space, a Public Security place. And there's lots of observation, indeed, though mainly passive.

Buying a high-rise apartment includes many incentives, not just the colour of the plaster of the wall and compound security, which many of these Shanghai high-rises over on Bund side have, but, for many friends and colleagues that purchase one, that is is indeed a private space that should not have someone's camera pointed at them.

Anecdote is anecdote though. As is assumption.

These gigapixel images are an extreme kind of landscape photography. None of these people are directly targeted in this photography.

Even street photography doesn't target people as-is. They become objects, they are stripped from their identity. They are part of the picture only.

https://i.imgur.com/iaKNFrd.jpg

Wow, this is a lot of visual information! I wonder how it was done?

hundreds or thousands of pictures stitched together. they use a motorised "tripod" to move the camera.

Yep, I was wondering the same thing until I noticed that the traffic was a bit off... You'll notice the same cars appearing in multiple sections of the image

https://i.imgur.com/Jz4JmZM.jpg

Could the car have moved at the same time as the camera, such that it appeared in two different pictures which were later stitched together?

Yep, that's usually the giveaway of these types of panorama shots. Sometimes you can even find the same person in multiple places depending on how far apart the pics are taken.

Here's a quick screenshot I made of that very problem:

https://i.imgur.com/C6Vzoc8.jpg

I see a black screen on Firefox on Windows 10

Disable adblocker.

This is really cool! But the ad is annoying

I wonder which camera/lens they used?!

It's a high end, full frame, high resolution (36+ MP) SLR or mirrorless. Nikon d850, Sony A7R3, etc.

There has to be someone naked. Let's find him/her.

That water looks so inviting I want to jump in... not.

Ballari

Someone hide Waldo in there

I would actually love to find a game that uses one of these "gigapixel" images.

Who can find this person? :) https://ibb.co/5Y72GGG

https://ibb.co/6WrgD2h https://ibb.co/0hmLbcK https://ibb.co/0fKXfY0 https://ibb.co/WGSZj8S

I spent far too long finding that. Great game, haha

haha, nice find :)

He is watching you. https://ibb.co/3cR9n2b

So is he: https://ibb.co/gJb0q5S

First thing I thought is now people are going to be looking for people having sex in the windows. I guess my expectations were too low.

This is quite creepy

I agree. And if even that is not a permissible reaction to have, I'm sure my observation, that this is to photography what a million monkeys banging on a typewriter is to writing, won't fly either ^^

I love how clearly you can see the smog. Really cool pic though.

Holy cow the pixels!!!! Sooo mannyyyy. Zoom in!

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