Explore Tokyo through an incredibly detailed 150-gigapixel panorama

Remember that 1474-megapixel panorama photo of US President Barack Obama’s inaugural address (external link) taken by David Bergman in 2009? 360cities.net founder Jeffery Martin has topped that with a 150-gigapixel image of Tokyo, allowing you to visit the Japanese city from the comforts of your home, without spending a single cent too.

OVER 9000 PHOTOS

To create the massive panorama photo, 10,000 photos were taken by Martin from three different locations around the top of the Tokyo Tower in six hours.

The images were later stitched together by a Fujitsu supercomputer packed with 192GB of RAM, two quad-core Xeon processors and a 4GB graphics card. The whole process took three months before the 150-gigapixel 360-degree panorama photo was uploaded to the website.

Adventurous photographers who want to recreate a similar image for their own city, have a look at Martin’s equipment, which includes a Canon 7D digital SLR camera with a 400mm telephoto lens. You’ll also need to mount the camera on a programmable robot called Clauss Rodeon that moves and shoots more than one photo per second.

This is not the first Tokyo-based gigapixel panorama image taken by the 360cites.net. Another image, taken from the Mori Tower, shows the Tokyo Roppongi district. Two cities outside of Japan were also featured by 360cities.net, namely an 18-gigapixel photo of Prague, an 80-gigapixel photo of London in 2010 and an updated and even more massive 360-gigapixel image of the English city in 2012.