Innovation

"A miniature time machine," is how Illah Nourbakhsh describes just one of the many cutting-edge showcases in first ever Fine International Conference on Gigapixel Imaging for Science at Carnegie Mellon University this week.

The gigapixel gives a whole new structure to a photograph. Where a normal camera records images in megapixels, gigapixels contain billions of pixels that expand the structure of a picture down to the smallest detail.

The conference is attracting researchers from around the world who will explore the use of gigapan in the classroom, field and laboratory. It's the first event of its kind and Pittsburgh is savvy enough to be on the forefront of it.  The implications for science are unprecedented, giving them an opportunity to view cells close-up, even catalog entire collections of information such as insects.

Three exciting keynote speakers will share their thoughts on this new technology; Mark Bauman, executive vice president of National Geographic Television, Alan Eustace, Google's senior vice president and Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center.

The aforementioned "time machine" is called the Time Lapse, and is what has Nourbakhsh most excited.

"We would take gigapixel panoramas every five minutes for a year or more, enabling us to go back and forth or roll back time for a particular place," says Nourbakhsh.

Also featured will be full-sized galleries of panoramas to be judged by artists and others, which will be displayed for the public at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History until January.