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Pancam is a way of taking very long panoramic images. With Pancam you can make a 25m long image depicting the whole of Oxford Street that equals a 7 minutes bus ride. Or you can compress a 50 minutes boats ride on the Thames into an image of 8 metres. How does Pancam work? A sequence of images is taken from a moving vehicle. Central stripes of each consecutive frames are then cut out and joined together to one long image. The whole process can be automatised with common digital devices. A standard DV camera takes on the recording of the image sequence, a PC application takes the video feed and turns it into a static image. Motion can be represented by displaying a sequence of static images in fast succession. Pancam reverses this process by turning recorded movement into a static image. As such Pancam can only create recognizable images if either the camera is in motion or if the recorded objects are in motion. In contrast a still object becomes an abstract blur of horizontal stripes because only a thin visible stripe of the object gets repeated again and again. Similar to common photography Pancam demands the user to select and focus on what he wants to capture. The visual movement of objects passing by depends on the movement of the vehicle the camera is mounted on, but even more on the distance between object and camera. The larger the distance for example the slower the 'visual' movement of an object. Think of the mountains close to the horizon which don't seem to move in comparisson to the trees on the roadside which you can hardly see when looking out of a car window. |
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Whether close objects or objects far away get joined together coherently is thus dependent on the width of stripes and on the frequency of capturing these stripes. At the same time stripe width and capture frequency also affect the length of the outputed image and as such the mapping between time, captured space and represented space. Both parameters can be adjusted in realtime within the software. CLICK ON IMAGES ABOVE TO SEE FULL LENGTH IMAGES Mac Explorer does not display the images correctly. Please use alternatively Safari or Firefox. Please report any problems viewing the images to pancam@nurons.net . >>> CLICK HERE FOR MORE IMAGES !!! |
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Pancam is currently being developed as a product. It comes in two parts. On the one hand a low cost digital camera records the journey of your choice. The camera has got two suckers on its front side so it can be attached to the window of a car, a plane or any other vehicle with a window. On the other hand a simple program takes the recorded sequence of image stripes and joins them to one long panoramic image. The program either detects an automatic setting for coherent assembly of the image or you can manually fine tune the "stiching" process in real time. Once the image is assembled it can be printed out on a roll of paper. |
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>> SEE PRODUCT SLIDE SHOW |
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| Pancam has been exhibited twice so far. In the first exhibition two very long images (12m and 25m) were hung up loosely accross the whole gallery space. The second exhibition was limited to a wallspace of three meters on which nine panoramic images of different time and space scales were mounted. Additionally a prototype of the Pancam camera, the accompanying software and 4m paper rolls of panoramic print outs were on display. | >> SEE EXHIBITION SLIDE SHOW |
| Download a panorama for your desktop. Click on one of the above thumbnails and save the image in the pop-up window by right mouse clicking on it. Currently only 1024 x 768. | |
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For any questions about Pancam or problems relating to the website please contact: |
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>> PANCAM@NURONS.NET |
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