High Resolution Inauguration Photograph

The Fullscreen Gigapan Viewer offers a very interesting look at last week’s Inauguration.  Who can you find in the crowd?  It’s like Where’s Waldo for the digital age.  Ultra-high resolution photography offers some interesting opportunities.  

Has anyone had personal experience with this?  I’ve seen scanback cameras used for fine art reproduction, but I’m not sure what kind of camera took this photography.  Could this be from a medium format digital camera like the the Hasselblad H3D-39II?  

Photo by David Bergman
Photo by David Bergman

EDIT:   According to the photographer’s profile page (David Bergman) the image is “made up of 220 images and the final image size is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels or 1,474 megapixels.”  That’s way higher than the H3D’s measly 39 megapixels.  The fact that it’s multiple images stiched together explains the pincushioning on the edges.  Still an interesting technical implementation.  What else could this tool be applied to?