111 Gigapixel photo of Seville sets new world record

For those who can't read Spanish, these are some tech details:<p>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.<p>Full details:<p>Spanish: <a href="http://www.sevilla111.com/comosehizo.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.sevilla111.com/comosehizo.htm</a><p>Google Translated: <a href="http://translate.google.es/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sevilla111.com%2Fcomosehizo.htm&#38;sl=es&#38;tl=en&#38;hl=&#38;ie=UTF-8" rel="nofollow">http://translate.google.es/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sevi...</a>

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: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#Imagery_and_coordination" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#Imagery_and_coordi...</a>). With a total land area of 148,940,000 km^2 (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth</a>) that puts the resolution of google earth's stitched together images at around 662 gigapixels (<a href="http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(148,940,000+km2+in+m^2)+/+(15^2+m^2)" rel="nofollow">http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(148,940,000+km2+in+m^2...</a>) (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?

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

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.

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.<p>If you ever get the opportunity, GO THERE.

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

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

And here is Paris - also a good looking town<p><a href="http://www.paris-26-gigapixels.com/index-fr.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paris-26-gigapixels.com/index-fr.html</a><p>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?

It turns out there's a bigger 152 Gigapixel photograph of Rio de Janeiro, published in September: <a href="http://www.gigapan.org/gigapans/58857/" rel="nofollow">http://www.gigapan.org/gigapans/58857/</a><p>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?<p>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.