Gigapan of mega SportsCenter studio

The new set, which debuts with Sunday’s 11 p.m. ET SportsCenter (following Sunday Night Baseball)

The soon-to-be disassembled set, which served ESPN and SportsCenter well through its decade of use

(Gigapan photos by ESPN’s Bradford Griswold; Click on photos to zoom and maneuver)

With a new SportsCenter set launching Sunday, Front Row is proud to share these two Gigapan photos of the current set (bottom) and the new one (top).

“Gigapans are immersive images composed of hundreds or thousands of individual images stitched together,” said coordinating designer, ESPN creative services, Bradford Griswold, a self-professed ‘photo nerd’, who photographed the studios with his personal Gigapan Epic Pro (ESPN also has its own Gigapans). “This gives the viewer the ability to zoom far in and explore intricate details of a scene or setting the way traditional imagery cannot.

“You can zoom in and read the writing on the back of monitors, take a look at the talent marks on the floor, see how the set is put together,” he said. “What was once just wallpaper becomes a visual playground for the viewer to explore. From a technical standpoint, even the best DSLRs are 20-30 megapixels. These images of the SportsCenter studios are around 4000-plus megapixels each.”

The hardware itself, according to Griswold, is a robotic camera mount that calculates precise angles, rotations and then moves and triggers the camera shutter so you get perfectly lined up images. Some recent Gigapan projects will further give you a feel for the tool and its capabilities.

Be sure to catch Sunday night’s debut and also check out some bonus content with Anchors remembering SportsCenter sets of the past (sidebar).

Check out more Front Row features on the opening of Digital Center 2 including: the official Fiber Cutting ceremony, coverage of the #SCMediaDay, meeting the faces behind Digital Center 2 (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5) and “you cannot be serious” facts about the new set.