Summary: If you’ve ever wanted to climb Mount Everest but haven’t found the time to make it to Asia, you’re in luck. Microsoft recently teamed up with GlacierWorks to launch an interactive website called Everest: Rivers of Ice, that lets you virtually explore the world’s tallest mountain. All 29,000 feet of the summit is mapped with gigapixel panoramas that are the next-best thing to actually being there. GlacierWorks has spent the better part of the last decade taking 14 expeditions to the Himalayas, and has over 7 terabytes of photos on the site to prove it. The final product is a photo-stitch that measures 120,000 by 31,840 pixels, tallying a mind-boggling 3.8 billion pixels. Microsoft took that photo and ran it through its Rich Interactive Narratives project, bringing Everest into most modern browsers. The site even offers touch controls, like pinch to zoom. Just as Sir Edmund Hillary did for the first time 60 years ago, now you, too, can climb Everest… from the comfort of your bedroom.
