The Gigapan is tripod-stand kinda device that latches on your digital camera, but the panoramic pictures taken with it are 100 times the resolution of the most advanced models in the market today. The picture taken is more than a gigapixel - or 1,000 megapixels - in size and you can navigate around the picture in-depth on your comp, much like how you use Google Earth. The Gigapan uses a robot mounted on a tripod to command a normal camera to take several hundred separate photographs of a single scene - each at a slightly different angle. The photographs are then stitched together by software. More than 350 pictures are taken to create the perfect picture, the device has been so named because each of its composite images contains more than a billion pixels.

Check out the views of the South Bank in London and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco here; navigate just as you would do in Google Earth or Wikimapia.
The Global Connection Project (GCP), which is backed by Nasa, Google and National Geographic, is still being tested, but will likely cost "in the order of several hundred dollars" when released. The GCP has not given any pricing details or a release date for the Gigapan. Digital cameras which take high resolution panoramic images are expensive. One, made by PanoScan, costs $37,000.

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