BOFFINS at the Carnegie Mellon University have come up with a gizmo that allows a camera to take snaps which are more than a gigapixel.

According to the Times, the Gigapan uses a tripod-mounted robot that takes several hundred photographs of a scene.

When the punter takes the camera back home the snaps are stitched together on a computer.

The idea has been around for a while, but the Times says that this time the results are a lot more impressive.

A snap of the South Bank reveals people in the London Eye and the time shown by Big Ben even though each is hundreds of metres away.

However to create this particular snap, the camera took 350 zoomed in photographs and created them into a single image. Often it can take up to ten minutes to get a decent picture.

The upshot is that it is possible to zoom in and out of the picture so it almost appears three dimensional. µ

L'Inq
Times Online