195-gigapixel photo of Shanghai allows viewers to zoom in on street-level detail
Faces and licence plates are among the details that can be clearly seen in an ultra-high-resolution bird's-eye photograph of Shanghai, created by Chinese company Bigpixel Technology.
Shot from 230 metres up the city's Oriental Pearl Tower, the BigPixel image offers a 360-degree panorama of Shanghai that users can pan across and zoom into, so that even people and objects at ground level appear identifiable.
The clarity comes because the image is made up of 195 gigapixels ? that is 195 billion pixels, or 195,000 megapixels. As a reference point, the latest iPhone camera takes photos at 12 megapixels.
The BigPixel image is made of 195 billion pixels
The image was created in 2015 but went viral last month, accompanied by rumours that it had been taken using new "quantum technology" fitted to a Chinese satellite. The reality, according to Bigpixel, is that the image is stitched together from thousands of smaller photos taken by regular cameras with 600 millimetre telephoto lenses to capture close-ups.
Viewers of the interactive photo can zoom in to see street-level detail
Still, the project required a huge amount of processing power. There are 8,700 photos adding up to 2.6 terabytes used in the piece.
The company told Dezeen that it takes a "high-performance professional workstation" to handle a project of this size.
Individual people can clearly be seen on in the photo
"In order to be quickly accessed by mobile phones around the world, it is necessary...
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