14 DAY TRIAL // Panoramic photos are becoming increasingly popular and a number of enthusiasts around the world are participating in an informal competition of sorts for the world's biggest panorama. The record now belongs to Jeffrey Martin which revealed a 80 gigapixel panorama of London.
Martin is no ordinary photographer, he's the founder of 360 Cities, a website dedicated to 360 degree panoramas, as the name would imply.
The record-breaking image takes the crown as the largest panorama image ever created, but the competition is pretty tight in the field. What's more, earlier this year a 26 gigapixel image was enough to take the title as the world's largest.
"The image of London, at 360cities.net/london, has a total resolution of 80 gigapixels, or 80 billion pixels. Shot by photographer Jeffrey Martin over a period of three days from the top of the Centre Point building at the crossroads of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, the image reveals the highest-resolution view of any city that has ever been captured," Martin explained.
7,886 individual images were stitched together to create the 360 degree panoramic image. The images were put together on a workstation with dual 6-core CPUs, 192GB of RAM and a 4GB graphics card.
The new image overtakes previous efforts like a 70 gigapixel image of Budapest, a 45 gigapixel image of Dubai or a 26 gigapixel image of Paris, all taken this year.
Earlier this week, 360 Cities partnered with Google to have panorama images available in Google Earth. In the user photos layer, along with the geo-tagged images from Google-owned Panoramio, users will be able to view 360 degree panoramas of various locations.
The images come from the panoramic photo sharing site. 360 Cities images were available before in the Gallery layer but are now included in the dedicated "Photos" layer.