Waste Your Day Hunting For Easter Eggs In Microsoft’s Gigapixel ArtZoom Panorama Of Seattle
Our apologies in advance for telling you about something that you can waste your entire day on, but this is, frankly, just really cool. Microsoft created a huge 20-gigapixel image of Seattle around which you can scroll and zoom around, but the company also enlisted the help of the Seattle art community to set up dozens of art installations around the city that you can hunt for “Where’s Waldo” style.
The Microsoft team used a Canon DSLR with a 400mm lens and a Gigapan robotic tripod head to shoot 2,368 22MP images that they then stitched together using the free Image Composite Editor (ICE). Then, they went back over the course of a few weeks, shot each art installation with 400mm to 600mm lenses, and stitched those images into the larger one.
There were video crews capturing the activity below, and when you do find one of the art pieces in the huge image, you’ll see a small window that you can click for more information about the piece and the artist. If you want to check your progress (or cheat), you can look at the Artist page of the Gigapixel ArtZoom website and get a visual of what each installation looks like.
The whole thing is great fun, and what’s perhaps most enjoyable is the accidental easter eggs you can find. For example, we spotted this orange guy right away:
However, he’s not actually one of the installations! Just an insanely tall guy dressed head to toe in orange spandex. And guys holding up signs next to him. What in the world is happening there? Are they photobombing the Gigapixel ArtZoom project?
There’s also this really cool chair on a rooftop:
We did find a couple of the actual pieces, though. Here are the two that we spotted first.
Can you find them all?
The Microsoft team used a Canon DSLR with a 400mm lens and a Gigapan robotic tripod head to shoot 2,368 22MP images that they then stitched together using the free Image Composite Editor (ICE). Then, they went back over the course of a few weeks, shot each art installation with 400mm to 600mm lenses, and stitched those images into the larger one.
There were video crews capturing the activity below, and when you do find one of the art pieces in the huge image, you’ll see a small window that you can click for more information about the piece and the artist. If you want to check your progress (or cheat), you can look at the Artist page of the Gigapixel ArtZoom website and get a visual of what each installation looks like.
The whole thing is great fun, and what’s perhaps most enjoyable is the accidental easter eggs you can find. For example, we spotted this orange guy right away:
However, he’s not actually one of the installations! Just an insanely tall guy dressed head to toe in orange spandex. And guys holding up signs next to him. What in the world is happening there? Are they photobombing the Gigapixel ArtZoom project?
There’s also this really cool chair on a rooftop:
We did find a couple of the actual pieces, though. Here are the two that we spotted first.
Can you find them all?
