Now

With the advent of digital photography it has become easier to create panoramic images. The days of paper prints a sharp knife and glue are over. Images can be shot digitally. Then stitched together in the computer, outputted as a long photographic print or viewed on a computer or as an interactive display at a museum. Even the humble snappy digital cameras have the facilities to shot and automatically generate panoramic.

QuickTime VR gives you more that 360° cylindrical image as they are cubic allowing you to see above and below.

The human eye field of view is around 160° by 75° so anything wider can be deemed to be a panorama. This generally means it has an aspect ratio of 2 to 1 or greater. Some panoramic may even have an aspect ratio of 10 to 1.
Normally shot with a fisheye lens attached to a digital SLR, raised of the ground to give an all round view.
Now we have further stretched the possibility of imaging with a system called Gigapixal. Which is mosaics of hi resolution images stitched together to form an ultra high resolution image containing 1 billion pixel elements. These are either generated from a hi resolution camera or a high resolution scan from a large format negative, 9 x 18 inches.

Section of a Gigapixal

            As you can see from the image above the amount of  enlargement is unbelieveable.
For a deeper description of Gigapixal follow the link
To create your own Quick Time VR follow the link