This picture is worth a thousand pictures | Hacker News Reader

This picture is worth a thousand pictures

slate.com

240 pointsabhimir38 comments

tl;dr

Photographer stitches together thousands of photos as a two-dimensional panorama. Very impressive and very beautiful, but the "hyperphoto" nomenclature might be a bit bombastic.

Direct links to each photo:

http://www.rauzier-hyperphoto.com/cour-de-marbre/

http://www.rauzier-hyperphoto.com/versaillesversailles/

http://www.rauzier-hyperphoto.com/escalier-de-la-reine/

http://www.rauzier-hyperphoto.com/versailles-city-hall-stair...

http://www.rauzier-hyperphoto.com/cle_de_voutecle_de_voute/

http://www.rauzier-hyperphoto.com/bibliotheques-ideale-1bibl...

http://www.rauzier-hyperphoto.com/telephones/

While I agree, the term 'gigapixel image' seems to be off-putting for some. The notion of an image you could zoom into forever like some of the Escher works is interesting.

I say a 600 dpi color image (at scale) of an Italian balcony at some event at the Bellagio, it was pretty impressive.

> zoom into forever like some of the Escher works is interesting.

Enjoy! http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=x...

Here it is on repeat :) http://www.listenonrepeat.com/watch/?v=xTsUAdoqq8I

Ken Perlin has done some interesting work on the subject: http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/experiments/demox/Planet.html

It is a render of a randomly-seeded "Earth" that supports zooming. You can zoom in continuously to recursively expanding island formations. The formations are not random, in the sense that they are not decided on the fly. They are fixed based on the original seed and will stay the same if you come back to the same location. So the trick resembles displaying a map that takes up a huge amount of memory, even though that isn't really the case. As I recall the limits of the zoom have something to do with the width of floating point.

Apologies to Ken if I inaccurately described his demo. He usually makes the source available for download but I don't see how to get it here.

Wow, until now I had not thought to look up where the name Perlin noise came from, but wow! Thank you!

(for others, Perlin noise powers much of motion graphics effects today http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlin_noise, like such: http://www.flashandmath.com/flashcs5/fire/fire.html)

Hyper as a prefix is defined as exaggerated or excessive; I think it's extremely accurate.

Cool pics, but not sure how much innovation there is here. He takes additional liberties with the images, duplicating sections in symmetrical ways to create elegantly surrealist landscapes. It is alot harder (ironcially) to do large scale and make it look "normal." Ie. he's masking some of the real difficulty, one of which is alluded to in the piece: Since the light changes as he shoots, matching colors presents another challenge. Subtle things like inconsistent light make Going beyond "uncanny valley" very difficult. But using an "Alice in Wonderland" (hall of mirrors, etc) effect/approach helps subvert the issue.

The last picture of the gorillas and the cell phones reminds me of Running the Numbers - An American Self-Portrait by Chris Jordan, which is one of the most amazing things I've seen for putting numbers into perspective (in this case using detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs)

http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn/

I was a little disappointed by the lack of resolution. I remember seeing some of these, one with mindblowing resolution. As the article states "You can see a closeup of the statues nose" it turns out.. you can't. You can see a full-screen of the statue itself, but that's about as far as it goes. While that's impressive, it's hardly cutting edge and overselling it makes it more disappointing than just presenting it.

I'm wondering if their server is just overloaded. It's like when you zoom in using Google Maps, the map tiles get a quick ugly resize, then get replaced as more detailed data is downloaded. At least for me, trying these flash photos, zooming in is immediately unclear and nothing ever replaces them with clearer. I suspect it's just server problems, though.

These pictures are so overexposed my brain has difficulty parsing them. Detail like this is not what is expected in photography, but the subject is.

A truly great photo is not about what you found, but what is already there. http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTU4OTI3MDk4MV5BMl5Ban...

Flash is required. If you do not have it (nor use it), like me, you will not be able to see much.

If MC Escher took photographs.

Wasn't Microsoft Research working on a technology similar to the 'hyperphoto'? It collated numerous photographs of the same location and allowed the viewer to navigate through multiple dimensions of the space.

You mean this: http://photosynth.net/

based on this: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/Ph...

Some of the clipping paths/layer edges on the first one are pretty rough toward the top. But a neat idea. It’s really more a collage than a “hyperphoto”. David Hockney – more known for his paintings than his photography – has done something similar, but with an emphasis on the image being composed of multiple photographs, not attempting to create the illusion of one continuous photo: http://www.hockneypictures.com

A 3D game company should hire him so we can walk around inside those things. :)

If you want something to scroll into check out http://www.360cities.net/london-photo-en.html

http://zoom.it/ is much older, seems much faster, and you can create your own.

Thanks for sharing. I thought it would be awful, but it was deeply profound in a strange way.

I'd like to make these desktop pictures - any suggestions on how to get the files?

1) make it full screen

2) zoom to the desktop image you want

3) take a screenshot

figured out how to get the ones I liked: http://imgur.com/gPHVa http://imgur.com/pKIe8 http://imgur.com/3JQyf http://imgur.com/dgIZA

Found what I believe to be the source files for the Versailles picture: http://www.hyper-photo.com/hyperpano/versailles/panojfr.tile...

I think it's sorted by resolution levels. So for example all photos with l1_#_#.jpg are at the lowest resolution while photos with l5_#_#.jpg are at the highest. The higher the resolution, the more photos at that resolution there will be.

To get a high resolution background of the whole image, you'd take all the splices at a certain resolution and put them together.

Does anyone know if there's an easy way to do this? Thanks!

Very cool. Pixels aside, even. Very visually interesting art.

Zoig...crashed

yeah.. no go for me either. i waited a good 5 min too

I thought so too but it finally loaded for me after several minutes and 125mb of memory. Could use a bit of lazy loading, I think.

Panning is a pain.

no need to pan panning

pan-pan pan-pan pan-pan!

All Stations!

Sailor, or pilot?

Astrogator.

This has been done for years to produce gigapixel images. In fact, there's even commercial hardware to make them easier to make (see: http://gigapan.com). As this made headline news when it was done for President Obama's inauguration back in January of 2009 (among other examples), can someone clue me in on why Slate thought this was novel or new?

It's not just a big photo. If you read the article you would see that these are fantastical works of art made from lots of photos and a lot of photoshop.

Did you read the article, or look at the pictures? They aren't simple panoramas.

Yes, and yes... Did you make the same comment on the other people focusing on the panorama portion of it over the art portion?

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