Smart phones these days come built in with a panorama feature that enables one to take a continuous image with an elongated field of view. This panorama feature relies on the accelerometer of the phone to detect motion and stitches the view using a maximum “match” of the next scanned frame. Although the typical use-case of panorama photography is capturing the surroundings around a stationary observer, we explore this feature through a different perspective, i.e., when there is a relative motion between the viewer and his/her environment (as opposed to a stationary observer moving the camera to capture a stationary 240 degree view). The unconventional motion of the camera results in very interesting and often surreal imagery, collapsing the fourth dimension of time into a two-dimensional form.

This project really goes deep into understanding relative motion and the stitching algorithm employed by an iPhone camera. It first started out as a fun experiment on a high-speed train, but then we got more involved into it and started exploring it’s effects under relative motion of water, people, cars, textures, and so on. As this project grew into an obsession, we started mapping the panorama to seemingly unrelated environments like during plays and performances. This led to us to wonder, if perhaps, the panorama of an object could reveal more about it..

I recently presented a series of images under the theme “Water” at the Graduate Arts Soiree 2015, at Media Lab, MIT. View the pictures from the event here.