Slashdot Mirror
Throwable 36-Camera Ball Takes Spherical Panoramas
MrSeb writes "Jonas Pfeil, a student from the Technical University of Berlin, has created a rugged, grapefruit-sized ball that has 36 fixed-focus, 2-megapixel digital camera sensors built in. The user simply throws the ball into the air and photos are simultaneously taken with all 36 cameras to create a full, spherical panorama of the surrounding scene. The ball itself is made with a 3D printer, and the innards (which includes 36 STM VS6724 CMOS camera sensors, an accelerometer, and two microcontrollers to control the cameras) are adequately padded, so presumably it doesn't matter if you're bad at throwing and catching."
... of Pokemon Snap I was thinking of.
-- the opinions stated above aren't those of my employer. in fact, they're probably not even my own. you know what, ju
Really cool man!
The only problem with 360 panoramas like this is that viewing it requires you to use some Quicktime-VR sort of setup that always looks bad with the corner distortion and awkward controls. It's hard to map a full spherical image onto a flat display.
It would be cool if those cameras could be upgrade/modified to take full motion video though. You get to be the ball, and look in any direction you want. Heck, with a bit of work you could almost certainly program something that could take a few snaps from this ball in the air to instantly recreate any space in a virtual environment. The combination of parallax from the movement and multiple (presumably overlapping) cameras should make it quite possible for a computer to figure out exactly what is where and what shape it is.
You could make spontaneous virtual tours with something like that. A couple of guys go out to a location, one guy throws the ball at the other, uploads the pictures via cell or wifi to some server that then recreates the space and lets people virtually fly around it. You could even do something like that for crime scene photos or anything that needs to document the exact state of a room.
I read the internet for the articles.
Hmmm so now I can take photos WITH my balls.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
this has come on a long way since you last saw it clearly. Mostly it's done with flash these days using the mouse to drag around or arrows if you prefer. Additionlly HTML5 viewers are starting to appear and mobile/tablet friendly viewers. See e.g http://360cities.net/
I can see parallax in the panoramas and I think it's a design flaw. To eliminate parallax all pictures of the panorama must be taken from the same focal point. Since each camera on this ball has its focal point in a different location, all panorama's taken with it will have parallax and the images won't line up perfectly.
However, with parallax data it is possible to extract depth information, enabling 3D images.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Should be stereoscopic. And there should be an immersive stereoscopic viewer.
-Max
Why not actually put a decent camera in there?
No reason at all -- you can buy sensors and lenses of nearly any quality off the shelf.
Looking forward to seeing your new and improved pictures! Let us know when you're done.
...but seriously, neat idea but hardly for everyday use. The seams are horrible in the resulting panorama. I presume each camera is using it's own auto exposure. What you need to overcome this is for all the cameras to communicate and decide upon a single exposure. Also might be difficult for the photographer to look natural when the shot is taken, but still catch the ball.
Good to see people trying different things.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
As long as this takes HDR photos, this would be immensely useful for 3d graphics work. And no, I don't mean the useless bad-HDR-lookalike postprocessing found in phones. I mean real, honest to goodness 16-bit, not-viewable-on-most-screens HDR.
May the source be with you.
And the data should be there - they just need a much more advanced image stitching system.
Except for small, hard rubber spheres, they haven't made a ball that my dog can't tear to shreds.
Just wanted to say, "How cool is this?" The creativity of humankind never ceases to amaze me. Things like this make me grateful and glad to be alive during this period of time. :-)
They could fire these at protesters!
It may get lost in the woods, fall from a cliff, eaten by an elephant or stolen by some poor kids when visiting a third world country.. It obviously needs a GPS too.
Yeah, that's the impression i got. With better processing this could look way better than it does in the video. It's probably not hard to infer the ball's angular velocity from the motion blur present in all the source images, which *ought* to enable some sort of deconvolution to make it all sharper.
Also, where camera areas overlap, you have "luminance comparisons" from one camera to the next. If the same surface looks darker from one camera than from another, that probably means that a light source has forced one of the cameras to auto-compensate by darkening the whole image. Account for that, the way they do in HDR photography.
If that was all done with some feature-recognition processing, the stitching could be made seamless.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
I can see the military and police going ape over this. Toss a ball, get a quick survey of hostile territory BEFORE going in. Even with distortion, it will be very useful without needing VR glasses.
It's also cheap(comparatively speaking) and light, so several can be carried.
For civilians, just think what it will do for paintball! Just make sure the lenses are easy to clean. :)
RTFA. They measure acceleration and compute the apex from that. Easy peasy and it works really well. Unless the planet you're on has wildly varying gravity, of course.
A new way to throw up a ball... for the literal majors...
Much better surveillance and pursuit ball from Japan. It would be easy enough to add more cameras to that thing.
"I hereby put the above thoughts into the public domain: screw you patent system."
You are assuming that you own this idea. You would have to patent it before anyone else does for that to be the case.
Use 36 video cameras and an attitude sensor, and combine the images and stabilize them to a particular attitude in realtime.
Now you can toss this thing at random and always see a 4-pi steradial view of the area no matter how it's tumbling.
Absolutely cool. I like it and I would buy it.
I'd expect different types of balls. For instance one that's nearly unbreakable. Or a bigger one which you can roll down a slope.
Imagine tossing the ball from one cabrio to another. Or taking a birds eye picture of a sport your buddy is playing. Or a ball fixed on a helmet.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
If you could modify it to take continuous pictures (stills would be fine), I'd *love* to send one of these up in a rocket! You could either use it for a nosecone, or eject it with the parachute. Let it come down either with the rocket or under its own chute. Another neat thing would be to fly one under a kite.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
Enemies will know it's a camera and try to destroy it.
Nope. They will assume it is a grenade and act accordingly. During WW2 a US destroyer and a Japanese submarine nearly collided. The sub was so close the destroyer could not lower its guns far enough, of course the sub crew had no such problem with its deck gun. As the sub's deck gun was being manned sailors on the destroyer noticed a bucket of potatoes that had been brought up to be peeled. They grabbed the bucket and tossed potatoes at the deck gun crew. The guys on the sub immediately began chasing the potatoes around and kicking them overboard, obviously thinking they were grenades.
Keep in mind that the brain *interprets* what you see. It sometimes "interprets" things in the image to be what would be most relevant or important. A grenade at your feet being more important than a potato.
A spherical camera in the baseball to softball size is highly likely to be interpreted as a grenade when it lands unexpectedly in your bunker.
Yea, all you'd have to do is throw it into a bunker, then go into said bunker to retrieve the ball, come back out of the bunker, plug the ball into a computer and look at the pictures. Then you'll know exactly what was in that bunker you were just in. Revolutionary I tell ya.
Years ago a cable tv documentary on robotics was showing a softball sized spherical device with multiple cameras (far fewer than the student's device though) that the military was developing. The idea was to just throw it over an obstacle, into a window or door, etc in an area of interest. The imagery was wirelessly transmitted to a laptop the troops were carrying. Of course this ball was not maneuverable. There were other small robots being testing that could be thrown, tossed onto a roof, through a window or door, and then driven via the cameras by one of the troops.
This would be a bad idea for the US military as everybody else in the world is better at soccer.
Humor aside, I think the US military has considered this line of thought and their prototype is baseball/softball sized. As a special bonus this size can be easily mistaken for a grenade so its likely to generate some activity in the area it lands.
And Wehm's micro-recorders. I thought I'd heard of these from some contemporary cyberpunk, just pinning down which story.
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
hell, my local county Sherrifs department has one of these
I've played with it at a police function....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I miss Stargate Universe.
For all the cameras to have the same focal point, the focal point would need to be in the centre of the ball. I don't think that's impossible to achieve, but it boggles my mind a bit trying to visualise how it would fit together.