Dean Putney attempts to create world's largest digital photo; Follow along in #boingboing
#boingboing regular Dean "Mustard Hamsters" Putney has built a robotic rig that frames his school's chalk board, invited his mates to come draw on it, and will now attempt to stitch together the world's largest image, projected at 40 gigapixels.
He's streaming the attempt live from his site, which will now break. Go Hamsters!
I chatted with him about it in IRC:
[joelev] what's the one line description?I've got to pop out for the evening, but you can join him in #boingboing on freenode.net if you want to chat back.
[joelev] You're going to tak ea series of images?
[joelev] and then stitch them together?
[mustardhamsters] how about Largest Digital Image Process Video Stream
[mustardhamsters] yep
[mustardhamsters] i built a robot to do it
[joelev] how do you know it's the record image?
[mustardhamsters] current is 16 gigs
[mustardhamsters] ours is a projected 40
[mustardhamsters] gigapixels
[mustardhamsters] we're doubling it
[joelev] you have a machine with enough ram to do that? :)
[mustardhamsters] i'm buying a solaris sparc server
[mustardhamsters] 10 processors
[mustardhamsters] 20 gigs of ram
[mustardhamsters] two raid cases each with a dozen 18 gig scsis
[joelev] bitchun
[joelev] I have to leave soon
[mustardhamsters] i can tell you about the whole process in a minute or two, i'm setting up the camera now
[joelev] but I will make a post
[mustardhamsters] best part about it: $500
[joelev] Godspeed!
Giant Photo: Second Attempt [MustardHamsters.com]
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The current robot would have left un-photographed areas of the chalkboard. Also, I was concerned that some things might fall off of where they were attached. Yes, it would have been possible to fix. Yes, it could have been done right then. However. I have spent a considerable amount of time working on this project, including several late nights. Ian and I have decided for the sake of our sanity and for the sake of our academic grades that we need to take a break from this project.
Our current plan is to redesign the robot over the summer and come back to build it next year. We hope to achieve a more precise robot and to spread the work out over a much longer period of time. I started building this robot just last week, and that is clearly not enough time to do something of this scale. I may or may not talk about the process leading up to this point and why I think it failed, but not in a comment.
If nothing else, I hope to have failed gracefully.
A related article on VRMag by Greg Downing.
Greg Downing shoots 270 Gigapixel Panoramas
That's 270 3-6 gigapixel images totalling 1.08 petapixels, not one single image that large.
"The post production requirement was substantial. We bought 36 terabytes of drives for RAIDs and backup, had 36 cores of CPU and upgraded the stitching farm network to gigabit Ethernet. In the field we used Karline Rodeon heads, 11" Vaio laptops, Canon 5D, 16 gig CF cards, with Epson 5000 digital wallets, and after seeing Ian Woods rig at the IVRPA conference we picked up a Zigview for buildings that had high parapets."
The Wiki Gods say the largest digital photo is of The Last Supper by HAL9000 at 16,118,035,591 pixels.
Interesting, I hadn't seen that Greg's project before. Very impressive. I got my information from Wiki about HAL9000. As far as I could find, the Last Supper image is in fact the largest at the moment.
If you're interested take a look at HDRI news. That's where I saw the link to VRMag. The Tools page has a listing of commercial and open source software for HDRs, panos and others.
Way to go, Dean...all the best in your next attempt!
Nex, thanks for the Greg Downing link, his gigapixel images were exciting. Liked the one in which the rattler was attacking his Nikon! I had heard about the HAL9000, but not the Greg one...
I'm looking forward to following Dean on his interesting journey
Yep, that link is great, but I'll admit it actually came from Noen ;-)