As the demand for more online geoscience courses increases, there is the inevitable need to create the laboratory component fully online. A major component of the geoscience laboratory course is the field experience. Virtualizing the field-trip experience satisfactorily has been a major barrier for instructors wishing to convert a traditional lab to fully online. Proposed is a method utilizing gigapixel imagery and internet browser technology that provides students the ability to interactively view the ultra high-resolution gigapixel images. The key to the best student experience being the ability to zoom in and out of images rapidly without affecting the performance of the online experience. A GigaPan robotic tripod head is used to capture the high-resolution, multi-image, 180-degree panorama of a field-trip location (such as Dry falls area of the Channeled Scablands of Washington state’s Columbia Basin). The gigapixel image is incorporated into an interactive student assessment and the students explore the image and zoom into areas of the image to examine finer and finer details that are not visible in the overall panorama, such as an individual lava pillow in a flow visible in a coulee wall. Another example is a gigapixel panorama of a large outcrop of sediments with zooming into such level that a student can identify small-scale cross-bedding along with other sedimentary structures.

This technology can also be used to capture gigapixel images of the lab sample sets (hand-specimen rock and mineral samples, for example) that allow for interactive, dynamic zooming by the student to get closer details of individual features, such as cleavage, fracture, or opacity on individual mineral grains.

Such use of gigapixel imagery will allow students to dynamically explore field-trip locations and hand-specimens observing an entire range of detail rather than the limited detail of static images, and, therefore, more closely replicate the in-person laboratory experience.