Gigapan

Gigapan was the second project I worked on at the CMU Robotics Institute. My team comprised several unfathomably brilliant scientists and me. For instance, the person who interviewed me for my job? Turns out he's the head of robotics at NASA Ames. Thank goodness I didn't know that at the time.

So, the idea behind the Gigapan was to allow anyone with a digital camera to (affordably) take massive-scale panoramas without requiring any extensive knowledge. Basically you'd be able to plunk your camera onto the Gigapan, set the four corners of the desired panorama and it would snap all the necessary pictures for you. After uploading them to your computer, it would then automatically stitch the pictures together and spit out an awesome multi-gigapixel panoramic image. That is, in fact, how it works now; however, when I worked on the project, it was still in alpha mode and did not perform quite as nicely.

My role in all this was to alpha-test the heck out of the Gigapan. Why they chose me for the position is a mystery for the ages, but nevertheless I used my nebulous skill set to go out and take a crap ton of panoramas around Pittsburgh.

There are a lot of elements to taking a good panorama, and up to this point I really knew nothing about any of them. My Photoshop skills were okay, but I'd never had more than a passing interest in photography and knew nothing about depth of field or parallax or vignetting. Yet here I was, bafflingly put in charge of all these expensive cameras and high-tech robotic equipment. I still feel a twang of guilt that there were so many aspiring and knowledgeable photographers out there and that I was essentially shoved into this job. But anyway. 

Unfortunately I can't find any pictures of what the Gigapan used to look like, but basically it was a small robotic mount attached to a circuit board and a battery pack. In effect, it looked exactly like a bomb. Every time I set it up, I'd get a lot of questionable looks from people assuming I was up to no good. A few brave ones would ask questions about the device, but most just looked and left me the heck alone.

Between May and August, I probably took 20-30 panoramas around Pittsburgh (and a handful in Gettysburg!). Not all of them made it to the site, and unfortunately a lot of them have been digitally lost. Each one comprised up to several hundred individual photos, which were then stitched together using PTGui to create a single image (tech note: I believe there is proprietary stitching software that comes with the Gigapan if you buy one now).

This was an interesting gigapan to take. That group of nerds is the CMU Class of 2007, which coincidentally would have been my graduating class, had I graduated and not joined the Gigapan team. To take this, I had to get up on stage, in front of all those people and hit a lot of buttons on a thing that looked like a bomb on a tripod. Here is a picture of that:

You can't see it in this picture, but Bill Cosby is also on that stage. This might have been one of the most nerve-wracking hours of my life: getting up there, making sure everything actually worked (a lot of the components were often faulty), sitting there nonchalantly to not draw attention to myself while Commencement happened, and then disassembling the equipment once it finished. Me being me, I also woke up late and had not planned how to dress myself beforehand and showed up looking like Neapolitan ice cream (though, punctual Neapolitan ice cream!), but I digress.

One Saturday that summer, I felt suddenly compelled to go and take a really freaking awesome gigapan. Since it was a sunny day, I went to work, grabbed all the equipment and trotted around Pittsburgh until inspiration hit. And it did: the top of Cathedral of Learning, duh! I didn't know if it would be possible to get a decent gigapan through glass, but it was worth a shot. There were a bunch of people up on the 36th floor, but I told them I worked for CMU and this was official business. They left. No one questioned me after that and I was able to take 2 or 3 entire gigapans (at least 2 hours and 3 SD cards worth) and head back to the office to get them stitched and see if any even turned out. Amazingly enough, something resembling this appeared several hours later. A bit of tweaking in Photoshop and voila! 3 years later, this will be on display at the US Steel Tower from October 11th to November 19th, 2010.