Super Zoom of Tokyo Panorama

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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.

The Tokyo Tower gigapixel panorama can be found at 360gigapixels.com/tokyo-tower-gigapixel.