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OmniCam360 Camera Cluster Lets You Choose the Viewing Angle

Posted by timothy on from the how-to-get-seasick-indoors dept.

Zothecula writes "Armchair sports lovers are at the mercy of TV directors who chose what camera angle is shown when. Most sports fans will have been frustrated with their shot selection at one time or another, but a new panoramic camera would put such decisions in the viewer's hands. Comprising ten individual cameras, the OmniCam 360 provides a full 360-degree of the action." Just don't roll it down a hill and try to watch the results.

4 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. Not what you need for sports! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You don't usually want a choice of directions to look from a fixed point - you usually want to be able to look towards one or two interesting bits of play from a different location.

    1. Re:Not what you need for sports! by lxs · · Score: 3, Insightful

      No what I really want is missing half the game because of commercials, endless repeats of missed goals, close-ups of players faces and/or third rate celebs in the stands. Think of the possibilities this system will bring to that!

    2. Re:Not what you need for sports! by durrr · · Score: 4, Insightful

      This would be great for porn

  2. I've seen this demonstrated 15 years ago. by XNormal · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The application was a video conferencing system. The omnidirectional camera had the exact same arrangement of mirrors and black baffles between them. It was placed in the middle of a conference table and the display was steered automatically by a microphone array that determined the direction of the speaker. This way you always got a nice framing of the speaker's head. It was essential for getting any kind of usable picture in a conference with multiple people back when bandwidth was limited and video compression was crappy. It would still be very useful today but I haven't seen this anywhere.

    http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?FT=D&CC=WO&NR=9847291A3

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