Saturday, December 19, 2009

An amazing way to visit Prague without leaving your computer

Prague is one of my favorite cities - my friends at Oracle (and now beyond Oracle - a "shout out" to Petra, Martin, Roman, Monique, Lenka...) have always taken such good care of me; the sidewalks are nothing short of amazing - yes, the sidewalks; great restaurants; beautiful bridges and buildings.

Wouldn't it be nice if everyone (excepts hordes of drunk Brits) could visit Prague? Well, now you can sort of, by visiting this site. It is an 18-gigapixel panorama photo of Prague that the photographer describes as follows:

"This is a super high resolution photo. Use your mouse to zoom in and see a startling level of detail. This image is currently (as of 12/2009) the largest spherical panoramic photo in the world. It is 192,000 pixels wide and 96,000 pixels tall. That’s 18.4 billion pixels, or 18.4 gigapixels! When it’s printed, it will be 16 meters (53 feet) long at regular photographic quality (300dpi). It was shot in early October 2009 from the top of the Zizkov TV Tower in Prague, Czech Republic. A digital SLR camera and a 200mm lens were used. Hundreds of shots were shot over a few hours; these shots were then stitched together on a computer over the following few weeks."

Enjoy!

1 comment:

Ittichai Chammavanijakul said...

Wow! That's amazing detail.

This web site http://www.fullscreenqtvr.com/ has done similar panoramic shots of cities, events and objects.

Thanks for sharing.
Ittichai