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70 Megapixel Webcam
Alien54 writes "Small swiss company RoundShot has released an interesting new item, the 360 internet Livecam. The Livecam is a digital 360 camera, capable of 70 megapixels. The Swiss company claims the Roundshot Livecam uses a high-resolution digicam designed for pro photography, as well as slit-scan technology, which apparently allows for 'seamless panoramas' of up to 360 degrees. The cam is also capable of a high zoom factor, zooming up to 20x. Apparently, the cam has 'far-reaching" applications, most importantly in tourism, weather stations, corporate websites, airports, sports clubs, construction sites and private residences.'"
...every hair on that breast!
...I bet you could trade one of these for a gmail account!
They seem to be big into panoramas. Check out their gallery
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Just in case you're wondering if you can afford this camera: According to a PDF called "Press release 11-6-2004 (42 kB)" in the article (no direct links permitted), the price is 9600 Swiss francs (CHF). This converts to 7,642.71 USD.
More confusing: "Presentation to the press 11-6-2004 (1,059 kB)" indicates that shooting a full cylinder takes 20 to 120 seconds. However, the data output rate is only 1 MBps, and it can shoot only 5 high-resolution (4.5 MB) images per day or 80 low-resolution (100 KB) images per day. Who can make sense out of these conflicting rates?
Using the same exact camera, I bet I could make a panaroma up to 361 degrees, 720 degrees, hell, unlimited degrees!
Is this really 70 megapixels? The press release is short on details, but I'm guessing their "slit scan" technology is simply a traditional line-scan camera mounting on a revolving shaft. In this case the camera would use a CCD that is a single line of pixels, instead of an array like conventional cameras. Line-scan cameras have been used in industry when high resolution is important (the chief tradeoff is speed, since scanning a full image requires moving the camera or the object).
I swear I thought I heard someone scream "Panaramic Porn!"
It goes for 9,600 CHF which is about $7,715 US. :)
Looks like I won't be getting one right away
Remember that 200 Mbps DSL article there was last week? Thats what its for.
Moo!
I can see the whole site starting to grind to a crawl even as I type this. Sopmeplace in europe, an MIS manager's beeper is going off, on a friday night no less.
What could possible go wrong on a friday night?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
which apparently allows for 'seamless panoramas' of up to 360 degrees.
they make it sound like it could possibly go larger.
Livecams are so low res that they are no good except for determining weather conditions.
I like this website alot. High resolution. Can't find anywhere else on web like it. Check out topless,thong chicks. With a 8000x2320 panorama.
best beach photo webcam on the planet.
Like checking the weather here.
hermosa beach livecam
yahoo livecam directory
...as well as slit-scan technology...
:)
I believe you're referring to pornography
So the camera spins on it's internal axis to capture a single image that is freakin huge. Ok... that is great... actually kinda cool.
But it's NOT really a 70 megapixel camera it can't take all those 70 megapixels at one time.
That would be like producing a digital camera that would shift it's lens really really fast in the 4 diagonal directions to piece together an image that was 4 times the original size.
I think they are going for marketing points on this one. What is honestly stoping a camera company from putting out a camera that actually shoots at 5MP but they double the image size and interpolate the subpixels and say it's a 10MP camera?
When I grab stuffs off the internet at 72dpi and I need to enlarge it, I use the same technique. I just think the whole MP thing is becoming just like the MHZ craze that started when AMD tossed the Athlon on the market.
"Yay! I've got a 1 billion megapixel digital camera!" - User after learning how to resize photos in Photoshop CS
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)... oops
Yeah, I know, it would take days for one image to come down, but man.. Compared to the seemingly crappy 0.000005 Megapixel cams they put on those things now.. Could you imagine how awesome those images would be? It would be worth sending a probe there with one of these mounted on it for nothing more than taking a 70MP panaramic shot. Seriously.
Panoguide lists dozens of programs that will stitch still photos together to create a panorama. Instead of spending $7k on RoundShot, one could buy a really good digital camera and tripod, then take the shots manually. A 5 megapixel camera rotated ten degrees per shot would produce 180 megapixels of raw stills. And yes, you could do the same with a videocam--just export the footage as still files using any number of video programs, then stitch them together. The scanning method of RoundShot is slow--it might be able to produce a 360 degree perspective from the point of view of a moving observer, but the observer wouldn't travel far.
The Swiss company claims the Roundshot Livecam uses a high-resolution digicam designed for porn photography, as well as cilt-scan technology, which apparently allows for 'seamless pornography' containing up to 360 females.
Founder of Mirror Moon - Tsukihime Game Trans
Tell me more about this...Slitscan technology.
Sounds like they have THEIR market picked out already!
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Check out this paper for images.
I do not moderate.
put one of these in every large city thats had UFO sightings. put an infrared camera in it and have it set to record movement in the sky... with a 24 hour watch maybe something interesting would turn up.
Just to let everyone know, what this little camera is, is a scanner on its side. Instead of moving a linear CCD sensor back and forth, this is just a linear sensor mounted around a servo. Really basic stuff here.
As far as the lens goes, It may be possible that they are not even using one, by using the "pin-hole" technique, but I am not sure this would produce good optics.
If we used the same description of megapixels for scanners, most scanners would be capable of a few tens of megapixels.
-Bill
-Bill
- Hugin is getting really good as a frontend for panotools. It'll be really great when alpha layers become available too!
- Getting the camera to take remote piccies is possible as well (although getting access to all the manual parameters maybe a problem -- no luck there with my canon a40)
- A stepper motor and its RS-232 interface is not that expensive or hard to find anymore (50 quid at Milford instruments).
- Or... you can build your own out of a floppy drive connected to the parallel port. Maybe a better solution, the milford stuff is getting pretty hot after a while and requires 9-15V
The question remains: How do you attact the stepper shaft to the camera? (I mean other than duct tape or lego)It would be nice to have a 90degree bent bracket as well to take piccies vertically.
Has anybody built a tripod like this? What did you guys use?
bundaegi is good for you
Why call it a webcam and not a camera - the only thing that makes a webcam a webcam is the crappy resolution, to accomodate the bad bandwidth that goes along with the "web" part.
~Berj
oh!yeah!
now the yahoo chat rooms can provide high resolute "boobies"!!!
far reaching?
Why does yahoo do this
it rotates with a slit, it's more for pictures of static scenery, than normal snapshots.
Someday we'll all be negroes
Wow and I thought it was easy to slip up and take a close up of a finger or thumb with a regular camera!
Buy one of the latest prosumer camera's like the Coolpix 8700
then attach a Panoramic Optic from 0-360.com
and you have and 8-Megapixel panoramic solution for about $1500.
smile, it makes everyone else wonder what you're up to
It's a single number that peopel can, and so marketers push, as the "good factor" of something. People don't want to actually research products. That is difficult, time consuming, and often leads one to the conclusions that there IS no best, just different tradeoffs. Most people would like things to be as simple as a number they can look at to determine how good something is.
For cameras, it's megapixels. Like everything, there are foundations in truth. A large problem with CCD devices, at least initally, was resolution. 35mm film is equivalant to at least 4000x4000 pixles (16 megapixels) if done well. CCd devices were struggling at less than a million. Worse, CCDs are luma sensitive only (black and white), so you have to do a colour mask on them, reducing the effective resolution you get out of them.
So for a while, pizels were a good measure of the quality you'd get. You could hook great optics to a system, didn't matter, the picture would still suck because the resolution was so slow.
Well, this is all not the case with CCDs any more. It's not at all expensive to build multi-megapixel CCDs, and some companies (Canon) are even using different technology to better capture light. Now it's all about the optics. Any professional photographer or cinematographer will tell you that the lense is critical, for analogue or digital, and you often spend more on it than the camera.
Problem it, it's not easy to attach a number to lenses to determine how good they are. Different ones are good at different things and there isn't an objective rating anyhow. Also, good optics re expensive. You just aren't going to build a stellar lense for $50. Pixel count is cheap, and thus easy to sell. Also good optics are pretty much mutually exclusive with small size, which is in demand.
As you noted, very similar to mhz. Used to be, mhz was a good emasure of PC performance. For one, Intel was the only real game in town, but also there wasn't as much variance in architectures. Plus memory was fast enough to fully support the processor's needs (no multipliers), there were no GPUs, DOS was single user/single task, and so on. More or less, other then waiting for things to load from disk, your bottleneck was the CPU. So if you doubled the mhz, you really did double performance.
Well of course that's just not the case today. However, it's already stuck as the measure. People know mhz, and it's simple. So to many, it is the definitive performance guide.
Unfortunately, not a lot you can do about it. Pepople will take the wasy way out and fail to excersize due dilligence and marketers WILL take advantage of this.
This isn't the first such camera. They call this one a bargain because the PanoScan was around $27,000 for its first model.
Other people have made cameras like this for far less at home. You can make a basic one for $50 in parts. All you need is a single line (or 3 colour line) scanner element as found in most scanners, a camera to put it in with a big lens, and a stepper motor to spin it instead of rolling it along the scanner bed.
You can even spin it by hand if you have something measuring how you turn it to expose each scanline right.
Check out this guy who built one on the cheap.
My favourite application was the guy who took pictures of the moon using a single line scanner. He put the scanner into the eyepiece of a fixed telescope. Then, he had the earth rotate, thus passing the scanner over the surface of the moon to record an image.
The reason he could only do the moon is the scanner elements from hand scanners are not that light sensative. They expect a bright light to light up the object.
Of course, 70 megapixels is nothing. I have been doing giant stitched panoramas much bigger than that for a long time though I don't put them that size on the web.
However the first image of burning man on this page is 210 megapixels. You need to see it printed out, which you can if you come to Burning Man.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
"most importantly in tourism, weather stations, corporate websites, airports, sports clubs, construction sites and private residences"
so, basically, everything?
Jeremy Logan's Website.
The software for the camera is open source! Wee!
If it takes that long to shoot an entire cylinder, what prevents stuff from appearing twice in the picture, if it's quick enough? I mean, you could stand in front of the camera until it's got enough of you in the picture, and then run to the opposite spot so it scans you again, or some weird maneuver like that.
Nothing stops stuff appearing twice. It's that simple - the camera starts rotating and adds each slice to the current picture. You can then do all sorts of weird pictures in crowds or any scenario where there is a lot of movement.
I do wonder whether the CCD is 70 Mpixels or just the final image (and I haven't read the specs). I suspect the latter, as all you need is a CCD with, say, 4000 sensors mounted in an vertical array and the moving slit/lens combo allows you to read out the array every 7.5ms or so giving you 16000 horizontal pixels for the two minute scan. That's closer to the way existing film-based 360' panorama cameras work - just expose a long strip of film progressively as the camera rotates.
Still extremely cool.
For those of you who want to muck around with panoramic photos and you don't own a 360' camera like this, you should take a look at the various panorama tools available. I particularly like Hugin although I also use autopano-sift to do some of the setup.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
This camera operates in many ways the same as the cameras on Viking I and II - a rotating platform presents a line of pixels to an imaging element - in Viking the system went a bit further in that the line of image data was scanned by a mirror to direct it to one of several photodiodes to image the different parts of the spectrum.
The advantage to a system like this is that number of pixels in the axis scanned by the slit can be increased by finer control over the stepping motors driving it. While at some point you end overscanning scene (each strip covers much of the same ground as the previous strip due to the angle of view of the imaging element) you do gain some information by that overscanning - so you do increase the resolution in that axis.
Now, a camera like this is USELESS for motion photography (so all the one-handed typists drooling over pr0n are S.O.L.) - in fact the Viking camera team created a picture of themselves while they were testing the camera on Earth - one guy got in the shot five times by waiting until he had been scanned, then running around behind the camera, getting into position again, and being scanned again.
HOWEVER, I'd love to have a camera like this for taking pictures of places like The Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, the view from Pike's Peak, and other scenic vistas - there is simply no way to capture these places with anything like a normal camera.
Imagine if a camera like this could be located at the summit of Mt. Everest!
Or better still, Mare Tranquillitatis
www.eFax.com are spammers