First Burning Man Imagery Appears

The geo hackers were out at Burning Man in full force this year. Above is a screen capture from a GigaPan taken by Rich Gibson. The view I've chosen is centered on the Man's heart, but he captured the entire structure from a crane and you can zoom in much further than I've shown here (launch the full-screen viewer). Rich took 45 Gigapans while he was on the playa.

In case you are not familiar with them, GigaPan is a project sponsored by NASA/Ames, Google and Carnegie Mellon. It provides the ability for thousands of photos to be stitched together to provide an immersive view of an area. The project consists of a robotic camera mount, a photo uploader and a photo stitcher. The site has a lot of amazing imagery including Boston's Charles River and SF's Twin Peaks. If this is interesting to you they've opened the Beta.

The image to the right was taken by Mikel Maron (the champion of GeoRSS and a speaker at the Web 2.0 Expo NYC). Using a kite aerial photography kit he got a shot of the man from above.

There will be more imagery coming. There will be aerial imagery from the crew behind Pict'Earth. There will also be immersive Streetside View imagery taken via modified tricycles. In the meantime I suggest that you watch the geotagged photos trickle in on Flickr on their OSM Burning Man Map (Radar post).