As I can attest firsthand, one of the biggest obstacles to getting students engaged in geology courses is being stuck in a classroom. It’s a science meant to be taken in by striding up hills and with a liberal application of hammers. And while it’s immensely beneficial to tackle the basic principles using simplified models and diagrams, it's hard to really appreciate them until you’ve seen them in the stony flesh, connecting with an unfamiliar Earth that's millions or even billions of years in the past.

In a world of tight class schedules and even tighter budgets, opportunities for excursions to the field are few, so the challenge is to bring as much of the outside world into the classroom as possible. Recently, a new tool has made it a little easier for educators to do just that.

That tool is the beautiful, explorable imagery created by GigaPan. The technology uses motorized mounts that guide a camera through snapping hundreds of high-resolution pictures that cover a predefined area. The images are subsequently stitched together to build a gigapixel (or more) scene that makes a standard panorama look like it came with a kids’ fast food meal.

Randy Sargent, along with a number of colleagues, started developing the technology at NASA. “I had been working on visualization software for panoramic images for Mars rovers (Spirit, Opportunity, and the K9 prototype rover at NASA Ames), and I got completely hooked on immersing myself in the zoomable Mars imagery—‘teleporting to Mars,’” he told Ars.

They quickly realized that it would be just as cool to explore unfamiliar places on Earth in this manner. So they set out to build the tools necessary for people to create these images themselves. Given the number of potential scientific and educational applications, the team reached out to support the early adopters who were willing to give it a try.

Detail and context

Geologists were among the educators who were trained and then unleashed on the world as voracious GigaPanners. Ron Schott, who teaches at Bakersfield College in California, has been sharing his experiences with GigaPan through his blog. Schott had been exploring better ways to help students visualize geologic concepts, and GigaPan has fit the bill. “In the classroom, students exploring a GigaPan can experience a joy of discovery that just isn't there in a traditional static photograph,” he told Ars.

Callan Bentley, an assistant professor at Northern Virginia Community College and fellow geoblogger, shares that view. “I think the key aspect of a GigaPan is that it is a single medium which combines both detail and context. The result is that viewers/users can start with the literal ‘big picture’ (zoomed-out) context, then let their natural instincts guide them to explore for detail in select portions of the image (zoomed-in),” he wrote.

Take the GigaPan at bottom, for example. At first, one takes in the large-scale structure: folded layers of rock. But you can also get up close, as you would on a field trip. Take a look at individual layers—their color, texture, varying resistance to weathering, and the wavy, small-scale folding present within the larger fold. Just don’t whack the screen with your rock hammer.

There’s something very satisfying about exploring an image in that way. Callan Bentley calls it the “Where’s Waldo?” instinct. “Whether the medium of their exploration is real life or a virtual maze, or a big photo (as in GigaPan), people like checking into the details.”

The broader appeal of GigaPans is not just that instructors can bring local outcrops into the classroom, but that they can access points of interest around the world. Students could take a virtual trip to, say, the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls in the same class, making it easier to illustrate concepts with examples students already know about. Students could work to piece together the geologic story of an area by examining several related outcrops at the same time, or work through directed activities like this exercise in correlating rock layers.

While you can’t normally fit an outcrop into the classroom, every geology department has its collection of rock samples. Still, some collections aren’t as rich as others—and none of them do much good if you’re trying to teach a course online. GigaPans can be useful here, too, allowing students anywhere to closely examine beautiful specimens of crystalline textures or delicate sedimentary features.

Geology isn’t the only field that has found a use for GigaPans. Randy Sargent told Ars, “We have geologists, archaeologists, ecologists and botanists, conservationists, entomologists, cosmologists—and NASA Ames continues to use the work as well, for prototype robotic explorers.”

Fossil dig sites can be precisely documented, deforestation and habitat loss can be shown in rich detail, and students can examine different ecological communities or get up close and personal with museum specimens.

These images aren’t just for academics, either. “GigaPans make scenes accessible to many who are physically or financially unable to experience the scene themselves,” Ron Schott wrote. “For example, I've never been to Antarctica, but I've gotten a much better sense of what it must be like by exploring it through GigaPans. If that isn't good outreach for all of the publicly supported scientific programs in Antarctica, I don't know what is.”

To see more, check out Ron Schott’s images or some created by Callan Bentley and his colleagues, or just browse all the geology images on GigaPan. Also check out the zoomable animations at GigaPan’s Time Machine page or Google’s Earth Engine site.