When you work in the virtual tour business, you have the privilege to witness technological advances almost daily.
But every once in a while these changes combine to create an effect that can only be described as a Game Changer.
Today we are proud to share such an culmination of technological advances.
For a lack of a better word: we’ll call it a Hyper Definition Virtual Tour , but before we get to the technical details, have a look at it:
Virtual Africa presents: The highest definition picture ever taken of Cape Town.
It might not look like much on first glance, but try the following and be ready to be blown away: click on the full screen button (bottom right) and then ZOOM !!
Some details as to the size of this image:
- It was created by stitching 1850,fully zoomed (x 20 optical zoom), 10 MegaPixel images together.
- The time it took from the first shot (top left) and last shot (lower right) being taken, was about 3 hours.
- It’s 205 000 pixels wide.
- The end result was a 25 GigaBytes RAW file which takes about an hour to open on my Macbook Pro.
Despite the size of the image, you can view it here because of a method called ’tiling’.
It works exactly the same way as mapping platforms such as Google Maps.
for example: When you view the whole of South Africa in Google Maps, the image obviously does not contain the high detail imagery of every rooftop in the country. It’s only when you start zooming in, that Google Maps loads the relevant information.
The same happens here. We’ve taken our very big picture and created hundreds of thousand lower definition pictures (or tiles) from it. As you zoom into the picture, only the appropriate tiles are loaded.
This allows you to explore a very large image on a relatively slow internet connection. Simple, but smart.
In the coming months we hope to use images like these to organize data, visually.
Once again, similar to Google Maps, we can overlay information on top of this image to further enhance your exploration of Cape Town and the good news is that we are currently working on a few projects which will allow us to do just that.
In the mean time, we would love to hear your suggestions as to what we should call this kind of image/virtual tour…..
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