Really big photographs and camera robots

The IEEE consumer electronics society is having a speaker on Gigapan tools on April 27 at NVIDIA.  I am going to try to get there even though I am planning to be at the Embedded Systems Conference all day at the TI day event.  The object is to try to make some engineering contacts at both events with a plus of some interesting technology presentations.
Anyway, Gigapan is about processing multi giga pixel digital images.  There is also a Gigapan robot for automating the capture of panoramic pictures with a digital camera.  This reminded me about the Gigapxl project that I read about several years ago.  Also another camera robot, the Sony Party-shot IPT-DS1 is a face snapping robot  - not much practical use I think.
There are also a number of unrelated gigapixel project on the web now.

GIGAPAN -
The Gigapan system was developed by Carnegie Mellon University in collaboration with NASA Ames Intelligent Robotics Group, with support from Google.
http://www.gigapan.org/ is  a site that stores and displays large panorama photographs.  They provide software for uploading to their site.  http://www.gigapansystems.com/ makes and sells the robotic panorama contraption that can be used with any camera.  The panoramas can be made of 100 or more pictures when captured with the panorama robot that is programmed to step through the desired angle vertically and horizontally and press the shutter release.  You program the number of vertical and horizontal pictures you want taken.  The robot comes with stiching software to put them all together.
This works best when there is no fast moving objects in the scene that will be cut off or show up multiple times if they are moving the same way the camera steps.

GIGAPXL -
This is a project in the opposite extreme operating before 2003.  The http://www.gigapxl.org/ site describes the film based project.  They built a really big camera for big film (9x18 inches) that directly takes 4 gigapixel pictures with one exposure.
They then digitize the results with a scanner.  The ultimate resolution is determined by the scanner used. They also produce wall size (like 20 feet) prints of the results.  The advantage is that with one exposure they have no trouble with moving objects.  They have photographed natural and historical sites across the country.

SONY PARTY-SHOT -
The Party-shot IPT-DS1 can be combined with either the Cyber-shot DSC-TX1 and Cyber-shot DSC-WX1 cameras that have face detection and smile detection.  This device is still current and being sold, though I have never seen it advertised or promoted.   The party shot is a small  motorized platform that the camera is mounted on.  The robot can pan, tilt, and zoom until it finds faces in the picture and then take a picture.  It can be programmed to control the range of motion and frequency of picture.  The cameras also have "smile shutter"  that uses the detection of a smile to trigger the picture. It sounds like a way to quickly get a lot of bad casual candid photos in group settings.  I can imagine pictures with at least one face in the group with a strange expression or bad camera or back of head.  
 But it does have a reasonable application as a more convenient way to get yourself in  a group picture - it is a expensive self timer.  Just set it up and then form your group in front of the camera , it will find the group, compose, focus and take several pictures automatically.