Mars Panorama on Hiperwall

Yesterday, NASA and JPL released a magnificent panoramic image of Mars taken by the Curiosity Rover. This 1.8 billion pixel image is made up of over 1000 images stitched together. More info can be found here.

I imported the image to the Hiperwall system in our Customer Experience Center, because I love enormous images. It took a couple minutes to import and store such an enormous file, but once imported, Hiperwall software allowed me to move and zoom the image in real-time.

In order to take a video of it, I used Hiperwall’s animation feature to start with the fully zoomed-out image (so we can see all of it), then had it slowly zoom in to an area with lots of detail until one pixel in the image was one pixel on the screen. It then held that position for a bit, then zoomed back out and repeated. All of this took just a few seconds to set up, then I shot the video on my iPhone. The video was taken at 4K/60 FPS, but I’m not sure YouTube will offer it with that quality.

This video shows our unprecedented ability to handle enormous imagery, but it also shows how easy it is to animate content on a Hiperwall. While Hiperwall is commonly known for Command and Control video walls, many of our customers use Hiperwall systems for corporate communications, live presentations, and collaboration, often in addition to their control room Hiperwalls!

Site Dossier

While looking at my website logs, I found an interesting service had been crawling my pages. Site Dossier (http://www.sitedossier.com/site/www.stephenjenks.com) tells a number of interesting things about the site, including the interesting discovery that there are over 3600 sites on the IP address (and by clicking the IP address, you can see what they are). I had no idea that virtual hosting was so efficient!