This. Well sort of. At least they are still putting personal effort in, but it does kind of remind me of the gigapixel war of a few years ago.
The first gigapixel photo was made by amateurs who used their own cameras built their own motorised tripod, wrote a lot of custom software to handle the stitching, let their PCs slave away for weeks on the processing and were hailed as pioneers.
The second significantly larger gigapixel photo was made by amateurs using camera gear gifted by Sony, off the shelf software, and processed on computers gifted by Microsoft in return for displaying the result in a Silverlight web app that ran from Microsoft's servers. Then they proclaimed how awesome they were.
It's a good effort they've gone to, but I don't see the $100000 investment in the result and somehow I get the feeling they could probably have achieved similar with less, or quite possibly even did achieve it with less and the money is just the book value.