Most panoramic photography just stitches together a handful of overlapping frames. Maker Philo builds panoramas a different way entirely: one pixel-wide column at a time, thousands of times a second, from a camera in motion.
An inspection sensor repurposed for art
The project’s proof of concept was crude — a smartphone rotated by hand around a room. The real build centers on a Basler ruL2048-19gm, an industrial line-scan camera designed for reading conveyor belts on factory floors. Rather than a conventional 2D sensor, it carries a single row of 2,048 pixels, read out roughly 19,000 times per second. Mount that on something moving — a train car, a ferry, a bike — and each readout becomes one vertical slice of a much longer image, assembled into panoramas that can run for the length of a commute rather than a city block. Philo found the monochrome version secondhand for roughly a tenth of its original retail price. A 6-axis accelerometer/gyroscope and a SAMD21 microcontroller estimate the rig’s actual speed to keep the slices evenly spaced (GPS was tried too, but performs poorly underground or between buildings), all housed in a custom 3D-printed enclosure with a tripod mount.
The build has been running for the better part of a year: first captures on Boston’s MBTA Orange Line in December 2025, ferry photography near San Francisco in February 2026, color-sensor experiments and an EMFcamp presentation in April. The hardest part isn’t capture — it’s postprocessing. Objects closer to the camera race past faster than distant ones, so a single frame needs manually tuned “distance per pixel” values across different depth regions, assembled by hand rather than through any automated pipeline.
Why it fits here
Slit-scan photography has a real art-history lineage — but it’s usually built from scratch or adapted from consumer gear. Reaching instead for a sensor engineered purely for quality-control inspection, and pointing it at trains and boats instead of conveyor belts, is exactly the kind of repurposing this site keeps coming back to: creative use growing out of hardware nobody designed for creative use in the first place.