Carnegie Mellon University
July 06, 2011

Press Release: July Issue of Carnegie Mellon’s GigaPan Magazine Features Interactive Panoramas of Civil War Sites

Issue Commemorates Battle of Gettysburg, July 1-3, 1863

Contact: Byron Spice / 412-268-9068 / bspice@cs.cmu.edu

PITTSBURGH—Armchair historians can interactively explore nine panoramas of Civil War sites in Gettysburg and other Pennsylvania locales featured in this month’s issue of GigaPan Magazine, http://gigapanmagazine.org/, an online publication of the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute.
     
Viewers of the panoramas can survey the Cemetery Hill and Cavalry East battlefields, browse through the galleries of the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg, Pa., and visit the restored graves of African-American soldiers in Columbia, Pa., among other sites.
     
The large, high-resolution images were created using GigaPan technology developed by the CREATE Lab and NASA. They were produced for the Civil War Trails project, www.pacivilwartrails.com, a collaborative initiative between the National Civil War Museum, the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development and Carnegie Mellon University.  The magazine’s collection of panoramas was guest-edited by the director of that project, Laura Tomokiyo, a project scientist in the Robotics Institute.
     
The issue commemorates the events of the July 1-3, 1863, battle at Gettysburg and was inspired by Tomokiyo’s own experiences when she was a high school student in North Carolina.
     
“Under the leadership of an exceptional teacher, our class traveled to Gettysburg and marched across the battlefield,” she recalled. “I would wish that all young students could have similar experiences and hope that our virtual presentation of the places of importance in the Civil War can provide similar experiences for today’s youth.”
     
GigaPan Magazine explores the way that gigapixel imagery can deliver information, convey messages, tell stories, express emotions and otherwise carry meaning. GigaPan technology produces these images by using a robotic camera mount to take multiple digital images of a scene and then using software to stitch the digital images into a single panorama. The GigaPan website, www.gigapan.org, provides a means to store and share these large datafiles.
     
The Robotics Institute is part of Carnegie Mellon’s renowned School of Computer Science. Follow the school on Twitter @SCSatCMU.

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