Have you ever dreamt about photographing your own ascent of the Swiss Alps, but can never find the time to actually get around to it? Luckily, there are professional mountaineers who are, well, let’s just say, slightly more motivated than you and I. Now, you can enjoy the experience of climbing the notorious Eiger North Face from the comfort of your couch thanks to the radical photography project carried out by Dani Arnold, Stephan Siegrist, and the 12 GoPro’s they carried on their expedition to the top of the 13,000-foot (3970 meters) summit. The panoramic imagery they were able to capture is nothing short of breathtaking.
In the quick Making Of video, below, you can watch the climbers and a team of engineers develop a custom built rig designed to hold six GoPros. To help you visualize it, it’s basically a small(ish) cube with a GoPro facing outwards on each of it’s six sides. This is then attached to a pole which protudes from the climbers packs; each climber was outfitted with one of the rigs. With a little help from GPS and a whole bunch of external batteries, the rig allowed the climbers to capture sweeping 360 degree views of their entire trek.
“Our challenge: To develop an innovative camera system which can take perfect 360° pictures and videos in the most extreme conditions without unduly hindering the mountain climbers.”
Once the climbers made it back to down to the Mammut headquarters, the images the team captured were seamlessly stitched together creating complete 360 degree panoramic images. The results of the teams combined efforts provide us with this really cool interactive website, Mammut Project 360, which let’s you explore the images and join the mountaineers on a virtual climb as you work your way through the footage. Oh yeah, did we mention there’s video, too? Incredible.
[ Mammut Project360 via PetaPixel ]
