This Aerial Panorama of NYC Looks Like a Screenshot of Sim City

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The image you see above isn’t a screenshot from some city-building video game like Sim City. It’s a panoramic photograph of New York City captured by Sergey Semenov that recently won Epson’s Pano Award for most outstanding panorama captured by an amateur. Check out a high-resolution version of the image here.

If you’re wondering why the image looks so different from other photographs taken from the sky, the reason is because it’s not a single exposure photograph. Instead, Sergey captured numerous photographs of the city from various angles as he rode around in a helicopter, stitched the resulting images into a 3D panorama, and then flatted the 3D version into the 2D photograph seen above.

Here’s what the non-flattened version looks like:

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Want to browse the interactive 3D version in all its glory? Here it is (sorry about the autostart and the music):

You can also find a low-resolution version of this interactive photo over on AirPano.

(via AirPano via The Verge)

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