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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."
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
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!
...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.
Except for small, hard rubber spheres, they haven't made a ball that my dog can't tear to shreds.
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.