High-definition pornography is right around the corner.

November 18, 2004 4:46 PM

The Gigapxl Project has found a far less tedious method of producing stunning, ultra-high-definition images (up to 4,000 megapixels!) using specialized large-format equipment. (Another amazing image using multiple exposures can be found here.)
posted by neckro23 (34 comments total)

Ack, malformed FPP! The "tedious" link should be here.
posted by neckro23 at 4:48 PM on November 18, 2004

No worries, this is still cool enough to overlook the FPP faux pas.

And oh my sweet Jesus those pics are simply freaking amazing!

I will definitely have a good time poking around on this site later on tonight when I'm off the clock! Simply awesome!
posted by fenriq at 4:57 PM on November 18, 2004

I'm not happy that the examples on the first page were of Torrey Pines beach. I don't live there anymore and I miss it. :-(
posted by Turtles all the way down at 5:06 PM on November 18, 2004

This is awesome!! Thank you for the post.

How long before I can take photos like this in a handheld device?
Does it work for close-ups, like a mineral sample?
posted by Balisong at 5:11 PM on November 18, 2004

Hey Turtles all the way down, that's what my first reaction was to the Delft picture! Shame they took such a boring shot of that lovely city.

Pretty amazing stuff.
posted by swordfishtrombones at 5:11 PM on November 18, 2004

Hmm. Not really very innovative technology. I mean, it's essentially just a very large camera, with a very large strip of film behind the lens. There are technical difficulties to overcome (keeping the film plane flat, projecting a good enough image circle, etc.) but these techniques have already been invented and used by the U.S. military. I guess I was expecting something more dramatic than a big sheet of film. Good stuff considering their budget.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 5:13 PM on November 18, 2004

I'm blown away by this quote from their site:

As we move toward an object in the real world, there never is a point at which we encounter a loss of image sharpness. We simply see that object in finer and finer detail.

Is reality cool or what?

I need to get away from the computer soon
posted by Turtle at 5:33 PM on November 18, 2004

The last link with the zoom is very cool. Focus in on a person then zoom in and out gives the feeling of falling (vertigo). I'd always heard they could pick up license plates from space, now you can see what that means. There are some strange artifacts that perhaps it was not a single exposure, such as the same person showing up in 2 places.
posted by stbalbach at 5:39 PM on November 18, 2004

Pretty awesome, though it'd be cooler if they did a more busy area (NYC comes to mind). A photographic Where's Waldo?

With photos like these, privacy might become a bit of a bigger issue. I mean, you can zoom in to people with an almost obscene level of detail.

Kudos to anyone who finds and can describe the car with a license plate of 64-VN-ZR (in the zooming one).
posted by Count Ziggurat at 5:51 PM on November 18, 2004

It's a strange red truck-thing with a roof rack, right pretty much in the center of the picture.

I'm glad it actually existed. After closely examining all the cars on the left side, I began to suspect that this was some sort of snipe hunt, and that when I couldn't find it you'd say, "Ha ha, made you look!"
posted by breath at 6:32 PM on November 18, 2004

It's the red one (Ford?) in the middle of the picture, with a white car on the left and a black car on the right.

Do i win anything?
posted by noius at 6:32 PM on November 18, 2004

I only read the headline from my RSS feed. I feel this is false advertising.
posted by grouse at 6:33 PM on November 18, 2004

On a similar note, I defy anyone to find the upper torso of a man, wearing a red backpack. He looks like he's wondering where his legs wandered off to.

Noius: your prize is ...




getting beaten to the punch! Boo yah!
posted by breath at 6:38 PM on November 18, 2004

The zooming in that last link is just incredible. It's so neat to see (when you zoom out after examining a license plate or whatever) how much data is hidden behind each of the pixels in the top-level view.
posted by rustcellar at 6:40 PM on November 18, 2004

(Looking at the car that Count Ziggurat pointed out, and panning left a little bit -- what the hell is a giant ship propeller doing there in the bushes?)
posted by neckro23 at 7:29 PM on November 18, 2004

The man-torso is on the right of the picture, on a path, looking like he'd be heading towards the street if he had legs to take him there. He's a white guy, dark hair, black shirt. There's some sort of bicycle sign in front of him and a driveway just above his head. He's approaching a cluster of trees.

I notice he has no shadow - not even his torso. They must've done a good little bit of editing for this thing.

Ah, and yes, noius, for second place you win, if for only a moment or two, my respect for attempting the challenge.

Peeping in one of the windows of the big white building at mid-right, I think I spy a little tupperware container. Wild.
posted by Count Ziggurat at 7:37 PM on November 18, 2004

I still have no clue where the man-torso is, but I did find the cemetery. Spoooky.
posted by neckro23 at 8:00 PM on November 18, 2004

The street area (at least on the right) is an easy place to find discrepancies caused by stitching it all together. On a side note, at a certain zoom level it really starts to look like The Sims.
posted by thebabelfish at 8:03 PM on November 18, 2004

It's fairly amazing how quickly you can notice the difference in the quality of the pictures -- they're stunning.
posted by nospecialfx at 8:04 PM on November 18, 2004

This is sure to help me hunt down those pesky replicants.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 8:05 PM on November 18, 2004

Find the group of four people, three of which are sitting. There is what looks like a Coke cup/can on the ground near them.
posted by thebabelfish at 8:05 PM on November 18, 2004

In any case, yeah, those other high def photos (on gigapxl) are fantastic. I just wish there was a similar interface to them.
posted by thebabelfish at 8:08 PM on November 18, 2004

Using the top-left corner as reference, down 1cm right 2.5cm is a building with a red roof. It is behind the mini-viewer on my screen, just a hair below the red box and to the right of its middle.

There is a white chimney on it just left of the centre of the roof. Opposite the chimney is a dark area, below the red roof; it looks like it might be a tree or a shadow. Below this dark area are several tall thin rectangles posed above a narrow horizontal(ish) rectangle. On my screen, this area is touching the mini-viewer's black frame.

Click where the left tall rectangle comes very close to intersecting the horizontal(ish) rectangle. Zoom to max.

That's my buddy Pieter, who is working on clearing the beach sand off the parking lot that was used for this summer's Beach Volleyball competitions.
posted by five fresh fish at 8:12 PM on November 18, 2004

The propellor is because the parking lot is for the marine engineering buildings. :-) At least, that's my guess.

Using the top-right as the reference, down one cm is an odd white dot jutting into the greenery. Down another half-centimetre is a small lengths of reddish roofs jutting to the left; these are above another line of redder roofs that form a much larger area of red.

If you have very sharp eyes, look to the left end of the small length of reddish roofs. Note the vertical height of the reddish colour. Look up about that same distance, and you'll note a sketchy blob of grey and a slight blueish tinge to the tree leaves.

Click on that and zoom all the way in. Zoom out until the yellow building just enters the picture. Pan left one full screen-width or so. Ikea!

Ange works there.
posted by five fresh fish at 8:27 PM on November 18, 2004

Man Torso explained:
"All 600 photos were taken over a period of 1 hour and 15 minutes. Taking a single photo and moving the camera to a new position took approximately seven seconds. Thanks to the long 'exposure time', some interesting artefacts are visible at the edges of the various photos. They include a parked car that seems to merge into a bus and a walking torso."

And found via cheating.
posted by vapidave at 8:35 PM on November 18, 2004

To the left of the picture is a power generation plant with two large, square, blue towers. Up the block from that rooftop (ie. toward the horizon point) is a long building with a steel rooftop, a series of seven blue peaks. The next building has a rust-coloured roof with a three-story concrete "stub" jutting out of it, housing the staircases and elevator (the building was never finished to its full height).

Anyway, click the bottom of that stub and zoom in. Scagamona or somesuch gang p0wn this building!
posted by five fresh fish at 8:42 PM on November 18, 2004

The zooming link reminds me of those hokey CSI-type graphics enhancers, which produce crystal-clear zoomed images from the grainiest of security camera frames. Except it's real.

Anyone else find the description of the last photo on this page amusing?
posted by anarcation at 8:48 PM on November 18, 2004

If you found Pieter (above), zoom out a bit. There is a blue building behind a brown building. At the right corner of the brown building is a street intersection. Panjo's is there, and a good number of folk walking on the sidewalk or riding bicycles across the bridge over the canal.

If you wander down the canal to the bottom left of the picture, you'll see that it's a high-density apartment area: student housing. The row-houses are painted a nasty colour of mustard. If you zoom out, you'll see four long rowhouses paralleling the canal, a fifth longhouse perpendicular to their left ends, and a sixth that curves across the top right ends of them.

In the second (from left) row of houses paralleling the canal, at the left-most end of that row, in the third window on the shady side of the complex, top floor, is Koenraad in his favourite red Mickey Mouse shirt.

I'm not going to point out which window has Laars and Krystile having a late-afternoon rompy-pompy. They'd be embarassed, and I really think it might get someone at Delft U in trouble.
posted by five fresh fish at 9:01 PM on November 18, 2004

Back to the Torrey Pines picture on Gigapxl - the best part is that the beach at the bottom, Black's Beach, is full of naked people. Really - it's a nude beach. Unfortunately said naked people tend to be overweight, middle-aged, hairy men, rather than the leggy supermodels people are expecting. Probably why the photos focus at the TOP of the bluffs.

That would have been funny though.
posted by mpemulis at 9:18 PM on November 18, 2004

so, I occasionally hang out at that particular naked beach- and I've never noticed so many people photographing, but I can't say I'm particularly comfortable going back there.
on preview, mpemulis: further down, it's a gay beach- leggy, ripped, young men abound.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 10:18 PM on November 18, 2004

Once you've found Man Torso, scan right just a smidgen -- you can see most of the rest of him emerging from behind the building.

Not only is he missing his lower two thirds, but his upper one third is leading him(self)? by about 10 metres.

Himself? Him-real-self? Except that was obviously a past image, so him-pre-self?

The terminology of multiple timeslices is so confusing.
posted by 5MeoCMP at 11:12 PM on November 18, 2004

This reminded me a little of the work of Clifford Ross. He's another guy that has made a very large camera.
posted by mexican at 12:51 AM on November 19, 2004

Yes, but... but... WHERE'S WALDO??? *pulls hair out*
posted by Moody834 at 1:11 AM on November 19, 2004

This is like the coolest thing I've seen all week. Now if only we could have photos at this resolution with a full (visible) spectral analysis.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 4:52 AM on November 19, 2004