click here to view zoomify

Although the subject matter itself is rather uninspiring – what looks to be a mainly industrial area in the Dutch city of Delft, shot from atop the Electrical Engineering faculty of Delft University – the resolution is indeed incredible. Choose an area off in the distance and zoom in, but wait a second or two as Zoomify downloads the higher resolution. Then zoom in again. And again. I could actually read the time on what looks to be a church spire, just behind the crane, located at the upper center portion of the pano. As you zoom in, notice the small version of the pano in the upper left of your screen where a red dot marks the location of your zoom within the overall pano.

The pano is a composition of 600 images, taken with a modern consumer camera and a powerful 40mm lens over a period of one hour and 15 minutes. As the website points out, “Thanks to the long 'exposure time', some interesting artefacts are visible at the edges of the various photos. They include a parked car that seems to merge into a bus and a walking torso”.

Of course, taking 600 images in RAW format requires considerable storage. The team at TNO decided to use a high-speed FireWire link between camera and computer, storing the photos on a laptop.

Some Technical Details:
- Final image dimensions: 78.797 x 31.565 pixels
- Number of pixels in final image: 2,487,227,305 (2.5 gigapixel)
- Final image file size: 7.5 GBytes
- Number of source images: 600
- Time required to capture component images: 1 hour and 12 minutes
- Time required to match overlapping images: 20 hours
- Time required to optimise project: 4 hours
- Time required to compose the image: 3 full days using 5 high-end PCs
- Time required to blend seams / correct misalignments / finalise image: 2 days

TNO TPD is part of the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research TNO, the largest independent research institute in the Netherlands. TNO consists of 15 institutes employing some 5,000.