Ariel Photography - Check this out

[Guest Photounit]

I was trying to get into Ariel photography (AP) but a recent cut in my income has temporarily (hopefully) stalled my plans..... AP is quite costly to do using manned aircraft and over the past few years, the use of Unmanned Ariel Vehicles or UAV's to do AP has increased significantly due to the advances made in the RC field. I found this image of a 360 degree VR panoramic of a Dallas Texas sunset that is pretty amazing. You need to have Quicktime viewer installed and left clicking and dragging moves you around in the image..........

Link : http://www.skypiximaging.com/qtvr/dallassunset.html

This was taken with a RC blimp or helicopter (I suspect a helicopter) using multiple images from a camera with a spherical lens that were stitched together with a Quicktime VR program that makes spherical panoramas...... This same technology is used to provide the virtual tours of real estate property that have become so popular....

This technology could be used in the fire service to gather info for making preplans, gathering topographical info, and even real time reconnaissance missions at incident scenes. There are presently police departments who have begun to use this technology as well as the major news media.

The only problem with UAV's is that they are expensive, they are not easy to fly, require a lot of precision maintenance and are potentially dangerous.... Although with the advances made in GPS, gyro's and auto stabilizers things are getting easier and safer.....

Just though someone might find this interesting........ This outfit SkyPixImaging is one of the big players in the AP field and they have some pretty neat stuff on the reset of their website :

http://www.skypiximaging.com

Enjoy......Bill