This 52,000MP Panorama Of Seattle Is An Artists Treasure Hunt

Gigapixel panoramas are getting more common now, yet, some have a bit of a twist on the usual amazing site-seeing extravaganza.

The team at Microsoft set out to show the stitching Kong-fu of Photosynth and created this ~20,000,000,000 pixel photo was made up from 2,368 individual photos taken with 600mm and 400mm canon lenses mounted on a Gigapan head.

In a similar way to the biggest where is waldo project we shared a while back, the team at Microsoft planted individual artists all throughout the image, making it a fun (yet challenging) find-the-artist-treasure-hunt. Unlike the where is waldo project, the artists were captured over the course of few weeks at six individual shootings.

Having no access to any single point that covers entire Seattle, the panorama is made from two 180 degrees half panoramas (separated by a gray line on the final output). Interestingly enough, each side was captures using several cameras with Photosynth compensating for any parallax error in post.

Here is an explanation by Microsoft’s creative team on the project:

The timelapse below shows how this huge photo was taken.

You can explore Seattle at gigapixel art zoom.

Thanks for the heads up Stefan.