A device that lets a camera take pictures with 100 times the resolution of the most advanced models on the market is poised to revolutionise amateur photography.

The Gigapan allows people to take pictures which are more than a gigapixel - or 1,000 megapixels - in size, effectively turning a single photograph into a panoramic experience, around which the viewer can navigate on a computer.

Yet the actual camera used is no more specialised than a regular digital model.

The Gigapan uses a robot mounted on a tripod to command a normal camera to take several hundred separate photographs of a single scene - each at a slightly different angle.

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The individual photographs are then stitched together by software on the owner's computer - much as amateurs have attempted to do for years by after taking several pictures of a wide landscape, only with more impressive results.

In this photograph of the South Bank in London, the viewer can zoom in on different parts of the same photo to reveal the number of people in one of the pods on the London Eye, or the time shown by Big Ben - 7.24pm - even though each is hundreds of metres away.

By bringing together more than 350 separate, highly zoomed-in photographs in a single image, the GigaPan allows viewers to zoom in and out of different parts of the same image, creating the impression of a 3D environment.

The device, which derives its name from the fact that each of its composite images contains more than a billion pixels, is in effect doing for amateur photographs what Google Earth does for satellite imagery.

In a demonstration of the device given to Times Online, the Gigapan took 360 images of San Francisco bay over a period of about ten minutes - 36 across and 10 in each column.

The overall period of exposure is longer than with a traditional panoramic camera - which presents problems if moving objects enter the frame, as these ghostly images of torsos without legs show. By the time the camera tilts itself down several degrees after taking an picture which included a man's upper body, his legs are out of shot.

The viewing experience once the composite image is loaded onto a PC is remarkable. A typical image taken by a ten-megapixel camera, which would contain ten million pixels, becomes more fuzzy as you zoom in on it. The Gigapan's, by comparison, retains its sharpness across its full breadth and width.

The Gigapan was created by a group of academics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with the aim of allowing people to learn about foreign countries and culture by providing them with rich imagery of unfamiliar places.

"Our goal is to bring the world closer together by making it possible for anybody to take these panoramas and show them to people across the world," Randy Sargent, chief architect of the project at Carnegie Mellon, said.

The camera, one of several initiatives of the Global Connection Project (GCP), which is backed by Nasa, Google and National Geographic, is still being tested, but will likely cost "in the order of several hundred dollars" when released, according to a person involved with the trials.

The GCP has not given any pricing details, or a release date for the Gigapan.

Digital cameras which take high resolution panoramic images have been around for several years, but are expensive. One, made by PanoScan, costs $37,000.

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