so here i went and promised yesterday to share something revolutionary and all i brought back was this lousy picture of the breakwater. well, ha! it is, in fact, 30 lousy pictures of the breakwater stitched together seamlessly to form a rather comprehensive whole. it doesn't look like much at 640px wide, but the original, at 6917x1542, is pretty over the top.

mosaic panoramic shots are nothing new, but they are an awful lot of work, and they pretty much always look like, well, mosaics, that is, you can see just where each individual picture was slotted in. and even with decent software, the process of creating a reasonable quality image is pretty labour intensive.

until now, of course, and as i'm sure you've been guessing, herein lies the revolution. it seems the fine folks at the artificial intelligence lab at ubc decided to use their talents creating autostitch, just about the most amazing application i've seen in a few years.

it's so easy! all you have to do is take the pictures and then dump them on autostitch. it loads them up, figures out where they go, slaps them together and then does all the blending, perspective fixing and every other imaginable thing necessary all on its own.

it took about three hours to render the breakwater shot on my p3-1.1mhz, pretty amazing since it created it from over 150 megapixels of source information. and it's good code too, while it rendered i continued to use my computer as normal, with only the slightest bit of lag.

the user interface isn't much, but the program is a demo and is really just a proof of concept. but what a concept! it is a shame that autostitch is currently only available for windows, though i think it should run quite well on faster macs with windows emulators (*eyes krishen and davin*), or, mac users could borrow a few hours of processor time from one of their windows friends.

the breakwater shot was my first big try, and i'm looking forward to trying all sorts of things in the week to come. and i'd really love to see what the rest of you fellow creative souls can come up with too. so, whatsay we make it an assignment, due, say, thursday next? it's pretty easy, i did the breakwater in about five minutes, and all handheld. leave a comment if you think this is as huge as i do.