Take gigantic panoramic with ease

Forget about fish eye, this is clearly the future: (below the prototype of MIT, which we may soon see on Instructables /  DIY sites)

The device is capable of capturing multi-gigapixel, explorable panoramas with most off-the-shelf digital cameras.

You don’t need specialized GigaPan hardware to take your own panoramas. If you have lots of patience, a high-quality digital camera, and a good tripod (or very steady hand!) you can take hundreds or thousands of overlapping, zoomed-in pictures for a gigapixel-scale panorama, then use off-the-shelf stitching software to combine the images into one very high-resolution panorama for upload.

The WEB  interface for  navigating inside panorama is simply fantastic, the speed is great, as it make use of background downloading, image maps, asynchronous multi-part load and multi-pass refinement images load
 
GIGAPAN  and most popular shots are here (1445 available), Google is sponsoring the program (may we soon see huge panorama in Google Earth????)

The commercial version will be available here for $275