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Throwable 360 degree Panoramic Ball Camera
- zaph0d 15y agoMuch more usable & interesting than the Lytro, IMHO.
- biot 15y agoIndeed. Just imagine a wedding where dozens of people are tossing their balls as the bride walks down the aisle.
- tikhonj 15y agoSeems like a really cool gadget. The resulting pictures are really cool and remind of Google street view more than anything else. I wonder if some of the techniques Google used to stitch together street view pictures could also be used to improve the results from this camera...
- Zakuzaa 15y agoVery cool. Stitching needs a lot of improvement though.
- swah 15y agoCompared to Google Street View?
- Shenglong 15y agoIt'd be a lot more awesome if it were smaller. I can't imagine carrying that around at the moment. However, it is really cool.
- Game_Ender 15y agoThis was a senior/masters project for some students. I am sure with more custom electronics you could fit the camera modules everything in something more baseball sized.
- davidw 15y agoIt seems like a small, cheap one might be a useful way to get a quick view of a 'hostile' environment; be that military, or some sort of dangerous physical environment.
- mrsebastian 15y agoYep, balls are already used in hostile environments -- and there's a camera-ball grenade launcher, too! http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/92192-home-made-grenade-launcher-digital-camera-shown-off-at-def-con http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/92192-home-made-grenade-l...
- daliusd 15y agoOverall interesting idea but I would expect better quality from single device. Now it looks like that each camera is completely independent - at least it is very easy to see lines where photos are connected because of different amount of light captured.
- miahi 15y agoThis can be improved in the stitching software. The fact that you already know the position of every camera is a big advantage, so you can take shortcuts in the stitching. Right now the stitch is probably just a spherical projection with static image boundaries, based on the known camera angles. I see a bit of individual HDR effects to compensate for the small sensor's quality, but no blending or exposure correlation between the photos.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- vacri 15y agoThere is the advantage that in every photo you're going to have at least one human supplicating to the ball :)
- chrisfarms 15y agosupplicate: to ask or beg for something earnestly or humbly -- word of the day Whereas a tripod 360 can't include the bass, won't all of these have a coy person directly below pretending to act natural like they didn't throw a ball straight up. Great little product though.
- bambax 15y agoIf there are two people they can throw the ball at each other and not be directly in the center of the picture. Or, maybe you can throw the ball in front of you even if nobody catches it: it looks pretty robust.
- wgx 15y agoNice bass != base in that comment. You definitely don't want a low-frequency rumble from your tripod affecting photos. ;)
- hxa7241 15y agoIt is on the very cusp where liberation turns to supplication.
- perlgeek 15y agoLooks like even 4π² steradian solid angle, not just 360°. Very cool stuff.
- muxxa 15y agoIs that Khao Sok national park, Thailand at 1:03?
- haraball 15y agoCheck out the other projects on that page also, the Augmented Reality Bridge builder using a white board is really cool: http://jonaspfeil.de/arbridgebuilder http://jonaspfeil.de/arbridgebuilder
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- swah 15y agoIts so cool that he lists hardware and software on the right side. (Hint: its not Haskell)
- johnyzee 15y agoHere's what I am waiting for: The 360-degree 3D panorama video format. Videos are recorded by holding up the torch-like camera orb which records in every direction. You no longer just watch recordings; you explore them. On a traditional TV, besides the playback controls, you control the direction to watch at any point during playback using a simple remote control. But the real experience is wearing the VR helmet which, using head-tracking, enables you to watch in every direction during the recorded movie. You can pretty much go and re-experience your vacation, even seeing things you never saw while you were there in person. How far are we from this being possible with current tech?
- 5h 15y agohttp://www.nimmobay.com/media/360-video/360-video-nimmo-bay-helicopter-resort http://www.nimmobay.com/media/360-video/360-video-nimmo-bay-...
- timmaah 15y agoThis isn't 3D with a VR helmet, but is 360 degree video with ability to pan/zoom/pause at will. http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2010/01/world/haiti.360/index.html http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2010/01/world/haiti.360/index...
- NakedRobot 15y agoWe are nearly there. Here I am a couple months ago in Vienna with my prototype 360º video camera http://www.flickr.com/photos/ianjameswood/6103733114/in/set-72157627444772753/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/ianjameswood/6103733114/in/set-... If you want more info, contact me via 360cities.net please :) The greatest limiting factor to this becoming mainstream is the availability of cameras. Also, bandwidth and video capability is an issue: I can't download OR view 4k video on my still very capable 3 year-old macbook for example. Now, Johnyzee I think mistakenly called it "360-degree 3d" actually, 360-degree images are 2-d, they are simply projected onto a spherical surface. They dont' however have any 3d information. Stereoscopic (i.e. "anaglyph, what people call 3-d, like what Avatar was) 360 video is another matter, and i don't think anyone has ever built that.
- 15y ago
- jonnycowboy 15y agoWould be better to lock the aperture and focus for all of the elements to the same values. Awesome idea!
- mckoss 15y agoVery cool idea. Did you notice the patent pending? What's your thought on the patentability of this "idea". I know when I first saw just the picture of the ball camera, my first thought was, "oh, if you throw the ball in the air you could take a 360 at the apex". I then read that is what they are doing. So, does the patent satisfy the "non-obviousness" test? It certainly seems clever, but it also seems to me highly likely that this is neither novel nor non-obvious.
- hopeless 15y agoI think the non-obviousness part is calculating and taking the photos at the apex of the curve because I didn't immediately get that. Also, why 36 cameras (why not 20, or 72)? I think the bar for non-obviousness in patents is ridiculously low.
- JoeAltmaier 15y agoJust capture steam in a cylinder, then extract the energy as the end of the cylinder expands with the steam! "Oh, that's obvious. At least once you show it to me."
- miahi 15y agoThis + high-altitude weather balloon = nice panoramas.
- mumrah 15y agoShouldn't that be 41,253 deg^2, not 360 deg? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_degree http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_degree
- hxa7241 15y agoYes, quite right. Although it would be preferable as 4π steradians as that is the SI unit of solid angle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_angle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_angle
- georgecmu 15y agoAt my old lab we built something similar (camera + ball + throwable) 12 years ago: http://www.ri.cmu.edu/pub_files/1999/5/ICRA_Cyclops_99.pdf http://www.ri.cmu.edu/pub_files/1999/5/ICRA_Cyclops_99.pdf Available electronic components back then were way larger than what's available today: we could only fit a single CCD camera in the ball. It did send a real-time video stream, though.
- jshort 15y agoWhy does it have to be a throwable ball? I'd imagine a much better picture if I had the camera on an extendable stick. Perhaps offering both options. I also wish the stitching was better, Microsoft's Photosynth app does an amazing job. An option to be able to lock exposure may help the quality.
- thematt 15y agoIf you made it smaller (size of tennis ball?), you could give them to soldiers and instantly have a great intel gathering tool.
- pbhjpbhj 15y agoI'd have thought a single line of cameras along an American football would work 'better' for that, a sort of scan system¹ ... ¹ - realistically the scan would have to operate too quickly to make a proper scan.
- silverbax88 15y agoThis + catapult = want. Please don't mod me down for my dreams.
- Francon 15y agoMind is racing with possibilities of what this could do when combined with a water balloon slingshot. Wonder how waterproof and shockproof they have made it.
- dylanrw 15y agoI'm sure this has the attention of the DOD. Personally I'd love to have one for while I was hiking.
- blhack 15y agoI doubt it. The DoD will likely go the right of micro-UAVs. They're not even difficult to build. Give me the budget for it and I'll have you a working prototype this weekend.
- vertr 15y agoThis would be great if you could tie it to a helium balloon and anchor it down with fishing line or the like. You could let it fly up 50 feet or so and capture some amazing images.
- ethank 15y agoIt would seriously make me vomit and be in awe if you could play these sequences back in the AlloSphere at UCSB: http://www.allosphere.ucsb.edu/ http://www.allosphere.ucsb.edu/
- goombastic 15y agoWhat I am looking forward to is a walkable sphere with a projection on the inside wall. You step in, walk in the direction you want to explore. Google street view would rock.