Nextfest Gigapan

The Nextfest team coordinated a team of well-versed Gigapanners to fly into Chicago and, in preparation for Wired Nextfest, take Gigapans of a beautiful array of Chicago landmarks. These will be on display at Nextfest this week, and we are pleased to curate them for the front page of gigapan.org -- so please go to the front page and reload often and explore the variety of images.

Beta Testing of Gigapan units continues

We are pleased to let you know that the distribution of Beta Test Gigapan units has resumed! The company we worked with originally, Charmed Labs, has teamed up with others and now a new company is able to build and help to run the Beta test for Gigapans. To sign up directly with this new company go to their website to register your interest in the Gigapan hardware.

Post-Hurricane Ike Gigapan images

We have already seen two Gigapan panorama uploads from Houston in the wake of Hurricane Ike. They are at: this curated page. We also know about other Gigapanners who will be taking more shots and uploading just as soon as they have power. So stay tuned for more. Our thoughts and well wishes go out to all those in the southern seaboard right now.

Conversations are Cool

We are pleased to see more people partaking of conversations on the website. That right-most orange button, "conversations," is an experiment in starts threads of back-and-forth about what you find in the panoramas and snapshots throughout gigapan.org. It's awkward to browse them, but you may find it rewarding. Once you have made a snapshot or added to a conversation, you will receive email updates whenever others respond to your comments (so long as you wish). I encourage you to give this a try. As an example of an across-the-ocean conversation, take a look at this one: http://gigapan.org/viewConversation.php?id=23110

Burning Man

Gigapanner Extraordinaire Rich Gibson has just returned from Burningman and took literally dozens of Gigapan panoramas that he has been uploading. One of my favorites is a billion pixels from a crane:
http://gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=8582

See an article also at O'Reilly Radar:

GigaPan Mission & Vision

We have recently heard some great stories about individuals stumbling onto our mission and vision for GigaPan and its home project, the Global Connection Project. There are two good places to read about our motivation for doing what we do with GigaPan, and here are links to both of them. We hope you enjoy learning more about the 'why' behind this project:

About Gigapan
About Global Connection