We got here…

 This video is uploaded by CMU. In the video, professor Illah Nourbakhsh talks about Ethics in Robotics. In part of his 41-minute-long lecture, Illah talks about the reason behind the GigaPan technology. Here is what he says (29:50 – 30:30):

“We got here by asking the question: how can we foster better humanization between children and different parts of the world, how can we cause cross-cultural understanding? …”

And then, Illah continues:

“… and the answer in our minds was about the power of the image, what if you allow people to do imaging in a way that is so detailed that you fall into the image, explore it, find details that enable you to have a conversation with people around the world, because you essentially exploring a microcosm of them. It says everybody on earth becomes a Google Earth producer; they are making something that has extreme resolution and sharing with others. So, then we made the technology.”