In 2007 Jeff Parks told me about a technology he came across called Microsoft Photosynth which takes multiple images and combines them, analyzes them and then presents them in a sort of a panoramic mashup that allows the viewer to get very granular into the details of an image and to view an image from multple angles.

A great presentation of the technology is on this video from the 2007 TED conference where the Notre Dame Cathedral is brought to life from a variety of images on Flickr.

I thought the technology looked really impressive, but I wasn’t sure it would fit into Evince’s frame of interest all that much. My thoughts were that it would take a pretty long time for one person to snap all of the photos that would be required to create a very rich “point in time” mashup relevant for informaiton gathering purposes. Furthermore the idea of gathering multiple images from multiple sources sounded interesting at first until I started to think about how I would go about sourcing which image contained the relevant fact I was interested in; or alternatively always asking myself if something was created from the multiple-source-mashup that either confused the material or created something that wasn’t really there.

That all changed recently. I was watching The BBC’s technology program Click which described a new product called the GigaPan Epic.

The product is essentially a mount for a digital camera (from my understading it is not camera specific but please feel free to correct me on that point) which robotically snaps a photo and then rotates fractions of an inch then snaps another photo, and so on. The result is that you end up taking hundreds of photos in a very short time and depending on the zoom setting on the camera the resulting images can be very detailed. According to the article the images are then combined using a program on the user’s computer.

To see the amount of detail that these images produce I encourage you to check out some of the projects posted on the Gigapan.org website.

The Richard Taylor states in the article that the technology is “entering the realm of affordable consumer tech.” “Affordable” is always a relative term but to give you an idea at the time of writing this post the entry level model of the Epic Gigapan retails for US$375 on the Gigapan System’s website. That price, plus the fact that it appears relatively easy to use means that there is a much higher likelyhood that this product will achieve serious consumer adoption.

There are obvious commercial and hobby uses for this technology, but what does it mean for investigations and security? It doesn’t take long to start imagining the possibilities from uses in threat risk assessments, to surveillance or Internet research. At that price I expect to see both the product and the resulting projects start to appear in this kind of work.