Microsoft Research has created their Photosynth tools to support large panoramas. To demonstrate, they made a huge panorama of Seattle with things to discover about the city. You can zoom in and see artists “doing their thing” and find out more about the artists.
This is similar to the technology they created with Zoom.it (formerly called Dragon). This rendition of the technology, however, allows for gigapixel images to be hosted with lots of different layers to zoom into and discover. Microsoft’s On the Whiteboard goes behind the scenes to the photoshoots of the Gigapixel ArtZoom.
You can check out the panorama and the artists around the city at gigapixelartzoom.com
You can creat your own panoramas using this technology at photosynth.net.