The Second-Largest Panoramic Picture Ever Is Somewhat Terrifying
360 Cities sent us this stunning, 600,000 pixel-wide, 360° panorama photograph shot from the 1,093 ft Tokyo Tower, and it's certainly a sight to behold.
The image is the second biggest panoramic photograph ever, and 360 Cities also shot the biggest photograph ever — an image from the BT Tower in London — but founder Jeffrey Martin said this image was "far better, more interesting, more people, better light."
It's certainly a sight to behold, but, frankly the detail is a little terrifying. Play around for it for a few seconds and you realize you can basically see into the private lives of people from miles away. Reddit users found some pretty weird things going on in the BT Tower picture earlier this year.
For example, here is a man, half-wrapped in a towel, washing his hands in a bathroom half way up a high rise building. We'd wager he has no idea this photograph is being taken:
Here's what that image looks like when you zoom out. You can look into windows far further away than this, in fact:
Of course, this image was made for non-nefarious reasons and it took a huge amount of work (Martin says the image took 6 hours of shooting, but over 4 months to assemble on a "gigantic" Fujitsu workstation with 192GB of RAM), but still... it's a little worrying.
You can play around with the image below or see a better resolution image at 360GigaPixels.com: