One World Trade Center: The Top of America | Hacker News Reader

One World Trade Center: The Top of America

wtc.gigapan.com

96 pointsthomasreggi26 comments

Reminds me: The days before 9/11 I played with some webcams that let you pan and zoom a cam and take turns if others were using it. There was one on the Empire State because I used it that day... There may have been one on a wtc tower, and I may have tried it too... Already down? Can't remember that well. Anyone else remember that? Or that type of webcam? Later on they got better, but have not looked into them any while. (I'll need to look into it.)

I remember using those when I was just a kid! I'm pretty sure that there was some sort of search term or operator that I used to find them through Google.

I used to have a huge list bookmarked, and they weren't just on famous landmarks. It was actually kind of creepy because some were located in offices, small businesses,etc.

One time a friend and I constantly rotated one of the office cameras until a guy got up from his desk and covered the lens with a piece of paper. I'm guessing that the owners didn't realize that they were accessible by anyone with an Internet connection...

I recall doing the same as a kid (and as a young adult). The one I remember searching for were the Axis network cameras:

inurl:/view.shtml [1]

and

intitle:”Live View / – AXIS” | inurl:view/view.shtml^ [2]

[1] http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl:/view.shtml

[2] http://www.google.com/search?q=intitle%3A%22Live+View+%2F+-+...

I live in the West Village. I zoomed in all the way to my building. I zoomed in more, saw myself zooming in on myself.

Strange loop.

Beautiful. I'd be curious how this shot was taken. Typically if you look to the top/bottom you can see the connection point where the camera was resting but I can't seem to find it in this pic.

http://time.com/10672/making-the-world-trade-center-panorama...

Although I would recommend watching the entire thing, the relevant bit is around 5:30.

Spoilers:

For anyone who doesn't want to watch the video (or cannot watch the video), they took all of the pictures they could with the camera mounted in one direction, then turned the camera rig upside down to finish taking the pictures. Since the rigging was now in a different location, the boom could be removed from the final product.

These are always really awesome. But for the love of god, invert the controls. Or maybe a button to switch between methods

indeed. And what's with the gimbal lock? Quaternions FTW.

Controls work great on a touch screen.

I found the MacBook (Pro?) that must have been connected to the camera with an ethernet cable: http://i.imgur.com/t1HYAIE.png

Look up at the tower, and zoom in on the Moon. Incredible!

Hmm.... There appears to be a water-mark box around the moon. Wonder if it was inserted as an Easter egg.

<tinfoil>The camera didn't capture the moon (out of shot, poor lighting, whatever), and they edited that in.</tinfoil>

Or maybe they just wanted to tweak it with a filter to make the moon more visible, but applied the filter to a rectangular area.

Here's the library they use for panorama rendering: http://krpano.com/

More demos: http://krpano.com/html5multires/

Apparently uses CSS3D and WebGL.

I want to believe this is either a plane or a satellite.

http://bit.ly/1ffbpQH

http://wtc.gigapan.com/wtc/?xml=wtc.xml&view.hlookat=-189.12...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056869/

What's inside the top of the antenna-spire?

In the documentation video I saw some strobe lights: http://time.com/10672/making-the-world-trade-center-panorama...

And a MacBook notebook, as someone pointed out. But what else is behind the glass?

http://wtc.gigapan.com/wtc/?xml=wtc.xml&view.hlookat=3.86&vi...

What is up with the glass boxes there? Staircase? Elevator?

Currently out-of-service greenhouses, maybe?

I don't see any access to the closest rooftop in that picture, so I would guess that it's a glass box covering a stairwell. I'm not familiar with the architecture of New York buildings though, so it's merely a guess.

Believe you're correct, as there appears to be a faint outline/shadow for a handrail as well, at an angle that would be used for stairs

I wish they'd make something like this that captured time lapse imagery... The construction going on in Brooklyn Bridge Park looks roughly like where they were at last summer. Would love to see the summer turn into this winter we've been experiencing.

Really awesome stuff :)

This is awesome. You can zoom in pretty deep.

I was able to zoom in and find my apartment building all the way down at Coney Island.

Would be really cool with a Google Map data overlay

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