A Chinese company reportedly created a photo with such high resolution, you can zoom from thousands of meters away to see people's facial expressions

Bigpixel

A view of Shanghai via Bigpixel's high-resolution image.

• You might call this the pinnacle of high-resolution images.
• It is the brainchild of a setup called Jinkun Tech, or Bigpixel Technology Corporation, and it was taken from atop the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai.
• The photo resolution, which is the toughest part to wrap one's mind around, is reportedly 195 gigapixels.
• A megapixel is one million pixels. The resolution of digital cameras and smartphones is often chopped up and measured in megapixels. For example, a 12-megapixel camera can produce images with 12 million total pixels. But, in this case, we're talking about gigapixels. One gigapixel is 1 billion pixels.
• Hit the link below to try the zoom feature yourself.

Here is the brief story of an obscenely large picture.

It is the brainchild of a setup called Jinkun Tech, or Bigpixel Technology Corporation, and it was taken from atop the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai.

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What it is not, contrary to chatter on social media this week, is some evil new Chinese satellite quantum technology.

It's just a very, very big picture, and according to the company, more than 8 million people have explored it, and many more are about to.

The photo resolution, which is the toughest part to wrap one's mind around, is reportedly 195 gigapixels.

Some context: a megapixel is one million pixels. The resolution of digital cameras and smartphones is often chopped up and measured in megapixels. For example, a 12-megapixel camera can produce images with 12 million total pixels. But, in this case, we're talking about gigapixels. One gigapixel is 1 billion pixels.

Bigpixel reckons it is more than 2,000 more times precise than a photo captured from an ordinary, consumer-level camera, which makes this 360-degree snapshot of a surprisingly sunny Shanghai day the world's third-biggest photo. Bigpixel says it's Asia's largest.

It is a collection of images that have been integrated over a few months using image-stitching technology.

Bigpixel says this is its first panorama with hundreds of billions of pixels. The result is an unearthly, uncanny, unnecessarily fearsome zoom - a zoom that takes you so close to the oblivious person on the street - in this case, in Shanghai - that, yes, you can literally see individual facial expressions.

The technology's potential for covert surveillance also becomes quite obvious.

Try out the zoom feature here »