This image capture of the Japanese Tea Garden, a famous San Francisco landmark, holds special significance in our Dreamscapes project. In the summer of 2015, when Joseph Smarr (Google) and Chris Lamb (NVIDIA) agreed to help me with this project, they asked me to provide them with an especially large image to ensure that their software modifications were working and robust. It took them four months of intermittent effort on nights and weekends before they finally achieved liftoff and created the world’s first grand scale Dreamscape in November 2015.

Two months later, in January 2016, Joseph and Chris provided me with the “keys to the kingdom”: a user interface to their cloud-based “dreaming” software, which I continue to use successfully to this day. In fact, I created the remastered version of the Tea Garden scene shown here a full two years later.

Japanese Tea Garden Dreamscape fuses computational photography and artificial intelligence; specifically, it consists of a 54-shot, 273+ megapixel HDR panorama I captured in August 2013 that was ‘interpreted’ by a proprietary enhanced version of Google’s “DeepDream” AI software in January 2018.