gigapan

it's great to come to work and have a new gizmo waiting to be fooled around with. randy sargent from CMU west came over on monday from his office down the street to show off the latest GigaPan mountings and left some loaners behind. one of them is coming with me to costa rica tomorrow and then to iceland next week before it gets shipped off to zurich.

we messed with it for about an hour before establishing that we had an incorrectly-tooled camera mounting plate; after some experimentation and a few photos exchanged with randy while on the phone, we got the thing working. it's a brilliantly simple idea: a bracket mounting that rotates around the x- and y-axes combined with a little shutter button actuator allows most small handheld digital cameras to take a mosaic of overlapping photos that can then be stitched together digitally into multi-million pixel panoramic images using gigapan's proprietary stitching software.