Generally, when snapping photos, you point, then shoot. With a new prototype “gigapixel” camera developed by researchers at Duke, you can shoot, THEN point.
Essentially, as engineering professor David Brady explains in this video, the AWARE2 Gigapixel Camera transforms a picture from something that you hang on the wall to something that can understood by interacting with it – on an interface that allows you to zoom in again and again.
The goal of this DARPA-funded project is to design a long-term production camera that is highly scalable from sub-gigapixel to tens-of-gigapixels, and one can easily imagine the military applications (surveillance and reconnaissance).
But don’t forget the commercial and civilian possibilities: gigapixel photos of Cameron Indoor for the mancave perhaps?