Gigapixel images – it´s all about resolution and detail – one gigapixel equals a billion pixels so we are talking about tons of data.
To be able to view such a picture, it hast to be sliced into tiny little bites – otherwise it would kill any present personal computer.
That technique is called pyramidial imaging, multiscale or deep scale and works quite fluid with Flash.

Click here to view a 86400*43200px image of our “Blue Marble“.

The uncompressed sourcefile was over 10GB big and took nearly a day to interpolate and cut it into 9 zoomlevels existing of 80.000 tiles.
The viewer uses the fantastic OpenZoom-API.