GigaPan - Interactive Panoramic Photo Community

If you like photo sites such as Webshots or Flickr which feature travel and landscape sections, but maybe find yourself bored with the limited content and features, check out GigaPan. Gigapan is a new photo project engineered by Carnegie Mellon University, which exclusively features panoramic shots which you can explore in a variety of ways.

Of course, Gigapans features all the options normally offered by social image hosting sites; you can comment on photos, tag them, bookmark them, etc. However, instead of just limiting you to viewing an idle image; you can pan, zoom, and freeze a snapshot.When you create a snapshot, which is essentially a sub-photos within a panoramic photo, you may treat this new image as a photo in and of itself which you can also share and comment on. You don't need to be the photographer in order to use this feature; anyone can create a snapshot and write a comment about it. You can browse images by tag, user, keyword, location, popularity, and date submitted, as well as upload your own photos. The technology behind GigaPan is the Gigapan robotic mount, which attaches to your small digital camera to create "a fast and easy-to-use high-resolution panorama capture device". You don't need to purchase this product in order to create these images, of course, but Gigapan claims it makes the panoramic creation process much easier.