After admiring the shot for a moment, play around with the buttons in the upper left-hand corner: zoom-in, zoom out; pan right, pan left. ... Now really zoom in hard and give the page a few seconds to reload. Holy gigapixels, you're right in somebody's living room ... or bedroom. (Fear not, it's all safe for work, near as I can tell.)
The company, located in Vancouver, explains the technology this way on its site: "A gigapixel image is a digital image composed of more than 1 billion pixels. It contains more than 150 times the detail captured by a typical 6-megapixel consumer camera.
"Gigapixel images are created by tiling a large number of photographs, or scanning a large film negative (8" x 10"). Gigapixel images are displayed online using streaming technology that breaks the image into small tiles and loads them as you look. This allows you to instantly view high-resolution images that are over several gigabytes in size.
"Gigapixel photographs are ideal for tourism, real-estate, architecture, medical imaging, archiving, and documenting special events. High-resolution images create the impression of 'being there' by immersing the viewer within the scene."
Not a word about voyeurism, but I'm guessing they spent many an hour scouring every lighted room on that photograph -- there are hundreds -- lest "being there" include capturing a Vancouverite (or two) in a compromising position. For example -- hey, this is my job! -- you might check out the room with the reddish light at the very top of the tallest tower on the right-hand side of the photo; zoom in all the way and you'll see a couple apparently ... dining.
Street View has already blazed this trail, of course, but Gigapixel is taking it to new heights -- literally.
Whether it's statistically meaningful or not will be left to the experts, but the perception certainly wasn't what "IT Team Obama" would want to see: Satisfaction with the Web sites of federal government programs took a dip in the first quarter, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, a longtime performance survey conducted by the University of Michigan and ForeSee Results.
We're talking about a half-point drop to 73.6 on a 100-point scale and the report authors speculated it could be related to high public expectations and/or issues related to the presidential transition. Personally, I'd give them another quarter or two before trying to draw any conclusions, but this clearly is an area in which the Obama camp must deliver on its lofty campaign promises.
But here's the most interesting nugget I found in the press release about this study: "With two sites scoring 90, the Social Security Administration has higher scores than any private sector Web site measured by the ACSI."
This one I will take a crack at explaining: Older folks do vote in large numbers and Social Security is always a hot-button political issue. Making a visit to those Web sites seem like a day at the beach is akin to keeping the roads plowed.
Failure is not an option.