111 Gigapixel photo of Seville sets new world record | Hacker News Reader

111 Gigapixel photo of Seville sets new world record

sevilla111.com

127 pointsvibragiel49 comments

For those who can't read Spanish, these are some tech details:

The gigapan is composed of 9750 pictures (f16, 1/800 S, ISO800) taken with a robotized Canon 5D MkII, a 400mm Canon lens and a duplicator (effectively 800mm of focal lens), and put together using Autopano Giga on a PC with two 6-core Xeons, 40GB RAM and 8TB disk space.

Full details:

Spanish: http://www.sevilla111.com/comosehizo.htm

Google Translated: http://translate.google.es/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sevi...

I would pay for the dataset of these individual 9750 images. Anyone with gigapan camera cares to share/sell some gigapixel images?

Photo nerd - the bit of gear they use to turn a 400mm lens into an 800mm lens is called a 2x teleconverter. You get double the focal length for a reduction of two stops in the available aperture and generally a loss of optical resolution.

What record did this break? Largest photo? Call me picky, but I don't see how this can be deemed a record. If stitched together photos count, then what about google maps? The average resolution of landmass is 15m for all of google earth (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#Imagery_and_coordi...). With a total land area of 148,940,000 km^2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth) that puts the resolution of google earth's stitched together images at around 662 gigapixels (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(148,940,000+km2+in+m^2...) (that seems lower than I expected, anyone want to check my math?). Wouldn't any stitched image have to beat that at least to be deemed a record?

They aren't stitched together, they're tiled. When you're loading Google Maps, you're loading dozens of relatively small resolution images.

And? I don't need to hook up fiddler to know that when I hit sevilla111.com I'm not pulling down a 0.1 terapixel image all in one go, I'm only ever loading a teeny tiny (tiled) sub-section of the raw image or a lower res version of the whole. Which isn't much different than google maps/Earth.

There's a difference. For this 111GP image there was taken 9750 images. Those images were then merged together to a single image using Autopano Giga and then split for the ease of presentation. Google's satelite photography on the other hand has never been merged into one huge image.

I'm with the OP. These images have not been merged together to form a single image. There is no 111 Gigapixel image out there that represents this picture. As you zoom in, you hit a different tile-layer.

Maybe the fact that this "single photo" is taken from a single vantage point makes it a record?

Well, turns out I wasn't entirely correct for this picture. They rendered it to three bigass images: http://translate.google.es/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sevi...

For some of the other massive Gigapixel photographs I've seen they've rendered it down to only one image file: http://70gigapixel.cloudapp.net/index_en.html#3

"Google's satelite photography on the other hand has never been merged into one huge image."

[citation needed] How do you know that? What are the odds someone in their organization has done that for kicks at some point? Or anybody else with a similar dataset.

True, but records aren't considered records if they're kept secret. Even if I could hold my breath for 25 minutes, Stig Severinsen would be considered as the best in the world at holding his breath until I publicly demonstrated that I could beat his time.

FYI, some of the photographed sidewalk ads are clickable and take you to the merchants website.

Location of one of them: Pan left until you see a rombus shaped roof with square patches of soil and grass on it. Zoom in closer and take look on the right for a standing sidewalk ad.

It seems the adverts have been superimposed? I wonder if they're the original adverts or they sold these "fake" adverts to cover the creation costs?

yup. definitely added later. that is pretty interesting...

I think so as well. The ads are too clear in comparison to surrounding area. One other ad I found stuck out a little bit more than the one I posted earlier.

Amazing. On maximum zoom, nearby blades of grass can be distinguished, but the atmospheric distortion of distant objects makes them look like part of an impressionist painting.

It's actually very blurry when you zoom all the way in. You can halve the resolution and not lose any information. So it's really a 111/4 = 27.8 gigapixel panorama.

Compare it with this:

http://www.paris-26-gigapixels.com/index-en.html

Which is much sharper when you zoom all the way in.

Interestingly, all graphical advertisements in the picture have been replaced with clickable ads for superinventos.com (e.g. the bus stop on the left side of the river)

If there ever was a city on Earth who's beauty is worth 111 gigapixels, then surely it is Seville.

If you ever get the opportunity, GO THERE.

Quien no ha visto Sevilla - no ha visto Maravilla! but Quien no ha visto Granada - no ha visto nada!

I'd love to go to Granada. Hopefully next time. :-)

"but Quien"

as a British guy living in Spain I can relate to this spanglish :)

I've never lived in Spain, I visited Seville last year on holiday

Well, quite seriously, if it was so, then why I see just some very large photo of a very dull and ugly regional town somewhere?

The image seriously doesn't do the city justice.

I spent 10 years of my life travelling the world, and Seville really is a jewel. Big time.

My holiday snaps (are rubbish but) better portray the energy at ground level:

http://bit.ly/e8KKCF http://bit.ly/hhI0P0

Edit: for some reason dropbox id 404ing those links. Check google images for Sevilla instead.

This must have been poor placement of the camera rig because I've heard good things about this place and these photos don't measure up.

A great city, a good place to take pictures, and 9750 images to share to the world. The about section has a lot of great info about this project. I hope they do some travel and bring us other locations like this.

I saw the white bridge on the far left of the picture and had to look it up, as it seemed very similar to a bridge I'd seen in Buenos Aires:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puente_del_Alamillo

Sure enough, it was the same architect (Santiago Calatrava):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puente_de_la_Mujer

BA's another amazing city; I would love to see it get the same 111-gigapixel treatment.

dragging his horrible ... the google maps way to move on a map is the only way that should be used.

You can change it by pressing the hand icon at the bottom bar

Who had the fun job of painting over every license plate?

They actually didn't get them all. On the right side of the image, there are some cars about to cross that haven't been painted over. I can convince myself I can read those, though probably not with 100% accuracy.

And here is Paris - also a good looking town

http://www.paris-26-gigapixels.com/index-fr.html

Zoom-able panorama. Not quite so many pixels but still pretty good.

Isn't this sort of pointless? If it were from a single sensor, or a single shot of a camera with multiple sensors, it might be something, but anyone can take a limitless number of zoomed-in images and stitch them together. How about someone stitches together all the Google street view images of I-95 into a big panorama? New world record?

"...anyone could have done x..." is such a silly idea. The point is they didn't, this guy did. Just like Mark Zuckerberg made Facebook, or that kid who made Chat Roulette. Anyone could have but they didn't.

Shouting about "111 Gigapixel new world record" makes it sound like it's a technological break-through. In reality it's the equivalent of "the world's largest candy bar" or "the world's largest taco."

It said "world record" not "technological breakthrough." The Guiness Book of World Records lists things like the world's largest candy bar or world's largest taco, not anything like significant technological breakthroughs.

You also have to consider the forum/audience.

Not "anyone" could have made Facebook. That required years of marketing and effort and refining a technique.

I mean, just by spinning the camera around a little further, to make it a full 360 degree panorama, he'll break his own record.

I should write a script that makes the "world's longest string of QZQZQZQZQZ" and submit that. Or the world's largest picture of Mario. I'll just scale an SVG up to infinity. Granted, this guy's picture took a little more effort, but the exact same thing has been done, there was no new equipment created here, no refinement of technique, no new development. That is why I said anyone could do it. He did nothing new.

Not at any quality with off-the-shelf software they can't, not that I've found anyway. Most software gives up a very long way short of this sort of resolution.

Really? Did you read what they went through to create this on the above link from Google translate? Seems like some serious effort went into this (12 attempts over 6 months), built their own robot controller and processed/checked thousands upon thousands of images

I think the end result is incredibly impressive and the technical issues they solved even more so.

It turns out there's a bigger 152 Gigapixel photograph of Rio de Janeiro, published in September: http://www.gigapan.org/gigapans/58857/

Much more crappy in my opinion, but certainly bigger, so this photo of Seville would not set a world record.

As a former Sevilla resident, nice to click around for a while.

I wish it were possible to down load the original image(s), it would make a great computing challenge for some of my friends trying to learn GPU processing with MPI =)

Does google have this technology?

I remember when at best buy managers at bestbuy had me pushing the 7 megapixel Sony's 3 years back.

Hey, you can read the wristwatch of one guy!! Awesome resolution ... But they should pixelize the faces properly.

Someone should build a zombie sniper game into a gigapan like this.

They have gone through and obfuscated the car plate numbers.

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