Charles Apple

If they’re successful, we’ll end up with a 3D portrait of everything: The Capitol, the guests, thousands and thousands of faces in the crowd.

And Barack Obama taking his oath to become the 44th President of the United States.

As CNN says, it hopes to…

…capture the most detailed experience of a single moment ever.

CNN is asking everyone attending Tuesday’s inauguration to take a photo of the precise moment Obama puts his hand on the bible — which should happen at noon. In fact, they’re asking folks with zoom lenses to take three photos: One each at wide-angle, mid-zoom and full-zoom.

They want these folks to send their pictures as soon as possible — good luck, considering the wireless logjam expected in D.C. tomorrow — to a certain e-mail address. There’s a 10 megabyte limit per photo, CNN warns.

CNN will then use Microsoft software called Photosynth to combine all the hundreds or thousands of photos, tie together the edges and create a seamless 3D panoramic view of everything. CNN says:

We’ll take those photos from every angle, combine them with CNN’s professional shots, and produce what we hope will be a breathtaking experience that will be demonstrated live on CNN and here on CNN.com.

Unless it’s a miserable failure, that is. In which case we’ll probably never hear about it again.

We’ll see how well it works, we suppose. The results will be viewable at cnn.com/themoment, CNN says. We’re not sure how long photos will be accepted or added to the montage.

Find all the details here.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 5:23 pm and is filed under Elections, Innovative ideas, Photojournalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.