There are a number of types of software that let you draw in pictures together,' Martin explains. 'What we do is offer photographers a way to publish 360 degree images which they've made themselves. It makes theirs a truly worldwide community. Some of the people who upload their images to 360 Cities are amateurs - and some are professionals. His 40-gigapixel photo inside Prague's baroque Strahov Library allows you to examine in meticulous detail the titles of ancient volumes, or zoom upwards to pore over the exquisite 17th century painted ceiling. Martin specializes in massively high-resolution images. 'They're very big and fully spherical, so they're images that - if you're familiar with Google Street View for example - let you look all around and straight up and straight down.' 'These are high-resolution images that let you zoom in and examine any place on the planet,' he told DW. Jeffrey Martin demonstrates his Clauss Rodeon setup, which rotates, taking images in 7200 steps Image: DW/R. But Martin and the thousands of photographers - amateurs and pros - who have uploaded their images to 360 Cities have produced some stunning, zoomable land and cityscapes, from Senegal to Siberia.

In this case it's a rather uninteresting image of chestnut trees and children playing in a park. The resulting images - saved on the Canon's memory card - can be stitched together on a computer to produce a perfect panorama. The lens clicks every few seconds as the robot rotates 360 degrees, before pointing at the sky to complete another circuit. With the press of a button on his laptop, the camera swings into action. It allows Martin to take some of the most precise panoramic photographs in the world. His camera is mounted on a Clauss Rodeon panoramic robot - a hugely costly device that's bolted to the top of a tripod. 'Since then we've grown to thousands of photographers in every country and hundreds of thousands of geo-located panoramic images,' says Martin. 'We were founded six years ago with a handful of photographers,' says 360 Cities founder Jeffrey Martin while setting up his 45mm Canon SLR in a leafy, non-descript park a few minutes from the company's office in Dejvice, Prague. It's produced the world's largest panoramic photo - a fully zoomable, 320 gigapixel image of London taken from the top of the BT tower. Run by a trio of Prague-based Americans, 360 Cities has just broken a new record.

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