Carnegie Mellon Web Site Hosts High-Tech Easter Egg Hunt

While nothing will ever replace the joy in a traditional Easter egg hunt for my children (at least the younger ones), all of them also really enjoy the I Spy series of books and computer games. Which is why I was so excited to find the cool "I Spy" like Easter egg hunt running on Carnegie Mellon University's GigaPan Web site.

The GigaPan site is a place where people can upload and interactively explore panoramic images, including the GigaPan panoramic image format developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon and NASA's Ames Research Center. Earlier this month, about 70 beta users from across the United States and England were invited to create and share panoramic images in which they have hidden Easter eggs, chocolate bunnies and other holiday treats.

GigaPans are large panoramic images, each comprised of billions of pixels that computer users can explore by zooming in on details within the images. A special camera mount, sold by Charmed Labs of Austin, Texas, enables any digital camera to take hundreds of overlapping photos of a landscape, building or room. Special software then stitches these images together for you into one massive, ultra-detailed, thousands-of-megapixels panoramic scene.

This Easter Egg hunt is just for fun - no prizes involved!

More: Easter Events in Pittsburgh