Super Zoom of Tokyo
Panorama
A newly
published 360-degree gigapixel panorama of Tokyo is the largest ever photo
created of Tokyo and the second largest photo in the world. The latest in a
series of landmark city gigapixel images from leading panorama photography firm
360Cities, the image of Tokyo, viewable at 360gigapixels.com/Tokyo-tower-gigapixel,
is 600,000 pixels wide.
Shot by photographer and 360Cities founder Jeffrey
Martin over a period of six hours from the roof of the lower observation deck
of the Tokyo Tower, the panoramic image allows viewers to zoom in from this
vantage point -20 stories up in the air –and see an astonishing degree of detail.
Countless landmarks, houses, skyscrapers, shops, offices, and streets are all
explorable in this one photograph. In short, it is a remarkable and unique
portrait of the amazing city of Tokyo.
Martin
tells io9 his goal in creating massive images has always been to extend the
limits of human perception – what he calls the image's "transhuman
aspect."—
“It's
the idea of creating a view that literally extends our senses far beyond what
we can sense on our own. This image shows you orders of magnitude more stuff
than you can see when you are actually there. Even if you are on Tokyo Tower
with binoculars or a telescope, this image shows you more than you can possibly
take in, in person.”
The
founder of 360Cities.net, a website where photographers can upload 360-degree
images of beautiful locations around the globe, Martin is no stranger to this
medium. He's even created an image that's bigger than the one you see here, but
this one, he says, is his favorite. It's a composite of more than 8,000 photos,
shot over the course of two days from the roof of the Tokyo Tower's lower
observatory.
If
printed at normal photographic resolution, the panoramic photo would be 100
meters long and 50 meters tall. Martin, a panoramic photographer and the
Founder of 360Cities.net, created the panorama from 10000 high-resolution
individual photos taken from the Tokyo Tower. These thousands of photos were
then stitched together as one single image on a powerful Fujitsu CELSIUS R920 workstation,
provided by Fujitsu Technology Solutions. The computer comprises dual 6-core
CPUs, 192GB of RAM, and a 4GB graphics card.
Zoom in on anything you want, like this one.
Somewhere in
there, says Martin, "is one dude sleeping on the ground." Find him
soon, though, he says, because he might go back and blur him out. "I don't
want to embarrass the poor fellow too much. A man deserves to sleep on the
ground without being laughed at on the internet, after all."
Hit the jump and explore the shot yourself.