Features - Gigapixel.com

Videos

CTV News Vancouver at Six: GigaPan Turns ‘Where’s Waldo?’ Into Child’s Play (November 17, 2010)

CTV News Vancouver at 11:30pm: Vancouver Whitecaps Opening Game (March 24, 2011)

CTV News Vancouver at 11:30pm: Downtown Vancouver 10 Billion Pixels (January 12, 2011)

CTV News Vancouver at Six: GigaPan Creates ‘Where’s Waldo’ of Canucks Fan Zones (June 13, 2011)

CTV News Vancouver at 11:30pm: BC Place Stadium Reopening (October 4, 2011)

Breakfast Television Vancouver: New Vancouver Interactive Display (October 14, 2011)

KATU News at 11pm (Portland, OR): Featured Company – GigaPan (December 9, 2012)

Global BC Noon News: 2010 Olympic Cauldron Chain-link Fence (February 17, 2010)

The Night the City Became a Stadium: Independent Review of 2011 Vancouver Stanley Cup Riot

Articles

Used as Reference for Books, Research & Academic Papers

Technocreep: The Surrender of Privacy and the Capitalization of Intimacy (Thomas P Keenan, 2014)

“A remarkable photo of the crowd on Georgia Street taken a few hours before the riot was posted by a company called Active Computer Services. It is actually a composite image of 216 high-resolution photos stitched together, and it reveals an uncanny level of detail. You can zoom in from the massive scene to identify individual faces with ease. Active Computer Services has a particularly telling motto on their home page (“I spy with my little eye…. “) and they tout the “forensic science” applications of their technology.”
The Socionomics Institute: Social Mood Can Be Evident in Facial Expressions (Alan Hall, 2013)

In the study “Social Mood Can Be Evident in Facial Expressions,” Ronnie Miranda’s pre-riot gigapixel photo served as empirical visual evidence to evaluate the collective psychological state of the crowd before the 2011 Vancouver Stanley Cup riot. The image’s high resolution allowed researchers to analyze thousands of individual facial expressions to map underlying social mood and link negative emotional indicators to concurrent financial market declines.
Researchgate: Report on Surveillance Technology and Privacy Enhancing Design (Eva Schlehahn et al., 2013)

The academic framework by Eva Schlehahn et al., Report on Surveillance Technology and Privacy Enhancing Design evaluates the impact of modern monitoring systems on civil liberties and outlines technical solutions for integrating “Privacy by Design”. The document references the commercial availability of gigapixel cameras to illustrate the rapid scaling of extreme-resolution optical hardware, warning that a single stationary apparatus can map massive public environments in high detail and effectively nullify physical distance as a protective barrier to personal privacy.

“…the panoramic image of the Vancouver Stanley Cup Final in June 2011, provided by the Vancouver Gigapixel Project, allows the tagging of individuals’ faces over a distance of the far away back end of the Vancouver Canucks Fan crowd. Information on the high-res image and its tagging functionalities are available online.”
Controlling Knowledge: Freedom of Information and Privacy Protection in a Networked World (Stefanick, 2011)

Lorna Stefanick uses the 2011 Stanley Cup riots in Vancouver to illustrate how mass surveillance has evolved into crowd-sourced digital tracking. She discusses how an estimated 100,000 fans gathered downtown for the final game, and notes that public surveillance and high-resolution online gigapixel photographs allowed individuals in the crowd to be easily identified and tagged on social media. Stefanick argues that this modern digital indexing effectively destroys informed consent for citizens in public spaces by linking their physical presence to their online profiles without permission.
University of New South Wales Sydney: Robust Search Templates for Face-in-crowd Search (Dunn, 2018)

The doctoral thesis titled Robust search templates for face-in-crowd search by James Daniel Dunn from the University of New South Wales Sydney contains a passage referencing Game 7 of the 2011 Stanley Cup crowd panorama.

“A crowd estimated at more than 100,000 fill the streets in Vancouver, Canada to watch Game 7 of the 2011 Stanley Cup. This image captures the crowd before a riot broke out that left hundreds injured and many more arrested (Gigapixel). Images like this were used by police investigators to identify the rioters (“Nine thousand tags… and counting: Vancouver ice hockey fans race to ID themselves in amazing crowd ‘stitch’ photo for Facebook record attempt,” 2011).“
The Strategic Prototype “Crime-sourcing” and the Science of Crowdsourcing (Graham, 2013)

This paper reviews the legal ethics of citizen-led “investigation-sourcing.” It explicitly documents how Gigapixel combined over 200 high-resolution images to create a public grid of the crowd. It raises deep concerns regarding digital vigilantism and the lack of evidentiary standards when the public crowdsources an investigation.
Salon.com: EFF’s Jennifer Lynch Discusses the Expansion of Biometric Data Collection and the Growth of Databases (2012)

Jennifer Lynch’s official written testimony to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee 112th Cong. highlights how “Gigapixel technology… allows anyone viewing the photo to drill down to see and tag faces from even the largest crowd photos. On page 10, Lynch officially argues how advanced consumer photography alters the legal definition of public anonymity. She explicitly states: “For example, Gigapixel technology, which creates a panorama photo of many millions or billions of pixels… allows photo manipulation that can improve the chances of matching a photo to a person already in the database.” The direct discussion of the internet-hosted gigapixel crowd photo itself happened during her press rounds.

“There’s a great example of this from the Stanley Cup in British Columbia. There’s this photo you can find online that’s a gigapixel photograph from a game… where you can zoom in from a picture of a massive crowd of people down to an individual person’s face…”
Social Media—New Masses (Baxmann, Beyes, Pias, 2016)

This media theory volume dedicates an entire section to how gigapixel imaging eliminates the traditional “anonymity of the crowd”. It specifically documents Gigapixel.com and Ronnie Miranda’s June 15, 2011, photo of the thousands of hockey fans in Vancouver. The book uses it as a foundational case study to show how high-resolution imagery permanently links an individual’s physical location to an indexed, searchable internet registry.
The Risk of Being Uninformed (Sliter, 2011)

A paper on the character and implications of risk in the context of economically motivated crime. Presented at the 29th Cambridge International Symposium on Economic Crime on September 5th, 2011, Cambridge, England.

Published immediately following the riots, this legal ethics paper directly examines the 2011 Stanley Cup Game 7 Fan Zone Gigapixel image. The author breaks down how the image allowed users to aggressively zoom in on individual faces right before the riots erupted. Slidell leverages this example to discuss the dangerous legal implications of “crowdsourced prosecution,” detailing how online communities weaponized public images to dox, identify, and harass people before formal law enforcement investigations even began.

“…megapixels and allows users to zoom in on individuals within the crowd immediately before the Stanley Cup riots in Vancouver, British Columbia on June 15, 2011. There are also some serious negative consequences to this type of information sharing. We recently witnessed how technology was used to proliferate the riots in…”
The Wall is the City: A Narrative Analysis of Vancouver’s Post-Riot “Apology Wall” (Lavoie, Eaton, Sanders, Smith, 2014)

This study frequently appears in research databases alongside the Vancouver Gigapixel Project is because photographer Ronnie Miranda created a companion gigapixel image specifically for this wall—capturing a massive, zoomable mosaic of 472 high-resolution photos so the public could read every single individual sticky note left by citizens. His 2011 gigapixel photography is listed in the references as an archival dataset used by the authors. The gigapixel mosaic served as a digital registry allowing researchers to verify the exact wording and original positions of sticky notes left on the Hudson’s Bay department store windows.