A 195 gigapixel photograph shows Shanghai right down to the tiniest detail

It has not beaten the current record, but the 195-gigapixel definition in this photograph is still breath-taking. And the number is no error. These are gigapixels, or in other words, 195 thousand megapixels. Taken by the Chinese company BigPixel, the image offers a classic panorama of Shanghai seen from the Oriental Pearl Tower, the television tower designed by Jia Huan Cheng from the Shanghai Modern Architectural Design Co. Ltd., which is 468 metres high. The shot was taken from a lower height, at 230 metres, in order to avoid a “squashed” effect for the skyline and a bird’s-eye view. Furthermore the panorama is three-dimensional. Viewers have a 360-degree view from the tower and can move up and down, as though they were looking out from a windoow.

The first striking element in the amount of detail that it is possible to see. This enormous poster allows viewers to zoom in as far as to focus on a single window from hundreds of metres away. It is even possible to see the face of a child or the brand of bag worn by a pedestrian. All of this has been made possible by the painstaking work carried out by an array of professional cameras (BigPixel has disclosed neither the number nor the brand), which took two months to complete. The images taken by each individual camera were brought together in order to obtain the panorama, and then processed to allow navigation.

By visiting the dedicated website we can in fact move within the panorama, zoom in and out, look at the sky or observe the gardens below. It is a stunning image which, however, as previously said has not broken the record. In fact, currently the largest image ever taken is 846 gigapixels, or rather 846 thousand megapixels, four times that of Shanghai. It was created by the researchers of the Malaysian Limkokwing University of Creative Technology International in 2014, and unites 31 thousand photographs to show Kuala Lumpur in all its splendour.