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

You might call this the pinnacle of high-resolution images.

The image, the brainchild of a company called Jingkun Technology, or BigPixel, was taken from atop the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai, China.

The company said the photo's resolution is a mind-blowing 195 gigapixels.

The resolution of digital cameras and smartphones is often measured in megapixels, or 1 million pixels - so a 12-megapixel camera, for example, can produce images with 12 million total pixels. But in this case we're talking about gigapixels, or 1 billion pixels.

Click the link below to try the zoom feature yourself.

Here's the brief story of an obscenely large picture.

It's the brainchild of a company called Jingkun Technology, or BigPixel, taken from atop the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai, China.

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.

The company said the photo's resolution is a mind-blowing 195 gigapixels.

The resolution of digital cameras and smartphones is often measured in megapixels, or 1 million pixels - a 12-megapixel camera, for example, can produce images with 12 million total pixels. But in this case we're talking about gigapixels, or 1 billion pixels.

BigPixel reckons its photos are more than 2,000 times as precise as those captured by an ordinary camera, and that its 360-degree snapshot of a sunny Shanghai day is the world's third-biggest photo and Asia's largest.

The company says it's a collection of images taken over a few months and integrated using image-stitching technology.

BigPixel says this is its first panorama with hundreds of billions of pixels. The result is an unearthly, uncanny, unsettling ability to zoom in so close to the oblivious person on the street that you can literally see their facial expression - making the technology's potential for covert surveillance quite obvious.

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