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Throwable 36-Camera Ball Nearly Ready To Toss
An anonymous reader writes "About 2 years ago, Jonas Pfeil, created a Throwable Panorama Ball: A rugged, grapefruit-sized ball with 36 fixed-focus, 2-megapixel digital camera sensors that capture simultaneously when thrown in the air, creating a full spherical panorama of the surrounding scene. Now, an Indiegogo campaign aims to produce the the camera (Now known as Panono) available for about $500. The quality of the sample images is impressive: the resolution is quite good and most importantly, the stitching artifacts are hardly visible."
Will it survive more than 1 hard landing
Expensive for a 1 shot device
All sorts of mischief will ensue from this. Thought it was bad enough guys taking cell phone pictures of girls' asses in line at McDonald's? How about ball-toss down-the-blouse shots? How about tossing it over fence level at your topless sunbathing neighbor?
Where do I get one?
Two guys, one with a large backpack, are in the middle of an always very busy Time Square, NYC, NY. They look around, excitedly talking to each other. They stop, the back pack goes off and a big, rugged, grapefruit-sized ball is taken out. They are seen fumbling with it, like they are using some kind of activation mechanism. Then one of them is what looks like preparing to throw said ball in the air. The police officer, who had been observing the whole thing, takes immediate action!
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
While a novel concept, I don't care to see what's happening "from the bouncy ball's point of view". Plus, unless you're in the Stellarcartography room from "Star Trek: Generations", you're only going to see a sliver of what's around you (given the limited nature of human vision), which will look like an even more dizzying version of the movie "Gravity"...
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
I wonder how long before we'll have software to interpolate a series of images from the same area into a rendered scene.
I'd be tempted to get one if the stitching algorithm could be run locally instead of on their cloud.
Better hope Indiegogo likes your project or it will get buried and rendered invisible by about day three.
You have to get it noticed by other websites of course. Like Slashdot, for instance.
Crowdfunding sites do absolutely nothing to help indie projects get off the ground. They collect their cut while they make rude gestures, and that's it.
Crowdfunding sites are about the only reason why I pay those projects in the first place. If it's not on kickstarter or on indiegogo, your chances of getting my money are very close to 0.
Frankly, I can't understand why anyone uses those sites. They're going to do all the work themselves. Why not keep all the money?
For the project starter, it offers a way to host the information, communicate with contributors, and receive money. All those things take time to do on your own, and the people doing the project would rather spend time on it, and not on setting up Apache, web sites, and working out how to deal with card payments.
For the contributor, it offers a filter that rejects the obvious crap. Also provides an intermediary that helps me waste less of my money. If a random project needs $100K to be viable and I donate through paypal, if they only make $10K, I can't really expect to get my money back. On kickstarter, that is assured.
On the project's own site, they control the interaction. They can ignore annoying questions and pretend everything is going great. On sites like kickstarter and indiegogo they can't do that, and it works as a great indicator to potential contributors about whether there's anything fishy about the project.
And I also don't believe for one fucking second that a bunch of clowns can put up a web page and raise $250,000 for a board game in four weeks. The fragrance coming off that shit makes my scam alarm strip naked and run into traffic.
And that's precisely why kickstarter and indiegogo are so awesome. You see what the project wants upfront. You lose no money if the required amount is not reached. People digging into the details of the project can post about it, and you can read their warnings.
There is still considerable risk of course, but so far I've not seen anything better than this. It's certainly loads better than to just send money through paypal to some random person.
You'll always have some yutz in the middle of your photo staring up at the camera with his hands in the air.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Stupid trinket. Buy one and throw it in the garage with the Hula-Hoop and your Nordic-Trac.
Aw, when writing it's is so easy to
to do this.
http://customerinnovations.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/paris-in-the-the-spring.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
And that's precisely why kickstarter and indiegogo are so awesome. You see what the project wants upfront. You lose no money if the required amount is not reached. People digging into the details of the project can post about it, and you can read their warnings.
Indiegogo has a slightly slimier feeling option on their projects where the project gets to keep the money regardless of whether they meet their funding goal or not. If you are supporting a project on Indiegogo and this matters to you, be sure to check out the conditions on funding the project.
From Indiegogo's FAQ.
What if I don't reach my funding goal? If your campaign is set up as Flexible Funding, you will be able to keep the funds you raise, even if you don't meet your goal. If your campaign is set up as Fixed Funding, all contributions will be returned to your funders if you do not meet your goal. Flexible Funding campaigns that meet their goal are only charged 4% as our platform fee, whereas campaigns that do not meet their goal are charged 9%.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Cannot wait to see what is possible when they do that with these cameras: https://www.lytro.com/camera/
I just hopped over to the site and saw a octocopter with one attached. I'm surprised Google hasn't gone to the sky...er...troposphere, yet.
Jonas from Panono here. We took the prototype up a rock spire in an awesome climbing area called "Elbe Sandstone Mountains" (actually free climbing was born here!). Check out the video: http://youtu.be/MTU4GSdDYOA
If you took this concept and made it into a chair, Steve Balmer would probably be a very happy man!
Ask yourself this question: same guys that raise $250k on Kickstarter for a board game sell that board game on their own web site and make jack shit. Why?
Because of the reasons outlined in my previous post, and that I repeat below.
Kickstarter adds nothing to the project. Why does the cash register ring only on Kickstarter but not on the project's own web site?
If you're unable to read, or to comprehend what is written, what's the point of asking? I'll answer again, in case it sinks in this time: because kickstarter doesn't allow obviously bad projects, doesn't take my money if the project doesn't make enough, and isn't under the control of the project's owner, allowing tricky questions to remain visible to potential donors.
On the project's own site, none of those things are assured. There's no guarantee that a failed project will give me my money back, there's no guarantee that the people who run it will not pretend inconvenient questions aren't being asked, and there's no guarantee that the project achieved a minimum amount of planning to make sure it at least has some chance of succeeding.
You're right. I used a crowd funding website and loaded up all my credit cards just to get it to the funding threshold, they didn't care at all that the name donating the most was the same as the name of the person running the project. I am still paying on the debt, basically all I got from it was some publicity.
Actually I'm wrong: I got a dozen copycats from the crowd funding. I will never crowd fund again.
...Google Balls!
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
Better hope Indiegogo likes your project or it will get buried and rendered invisible by about day three.
You have to get it noticed by other websites of course. Like Slashdot, for instance.
Like Slashdot? That's laughable. This site isn't that important. This article was posted at 9:30 this morning and it only has 50 comments at this point.
The sheep are busy bashing Micro$oft's time bomb.
Wake me up when it is pitch-able, hit-able and the size of a baseball. It would make our "national pastime" exciting to watch.
It might actually be easier to essentially embed this in a clear plastic soccer ball. You'd want to add a radio tx to stream the images out so you could have a "ball-cam" in the live feed. Maybe instant replay would be good enugh. With a spinning ball you'd need one hell of a fast shutter to cut out the blur.
Kernel of a good idea worth a big pile of cash but they have a long way to go.
"If a random project needs $100K to be viable and I donate through paypal, if they only make $10K, I can't really expect to get my money back. On kickstarter, that is assured."
"You lose no money if the required amount is not reached."
Confused much?
~_~ Not tonight, dear, I have a modem.
No, you are. I'm talking about donations directly to a project through paypal, without an intermediary like kickstarter that offters the "money back" guarantee.
Uh... Facebook, Instagram, Picasa, Tumblr, Twitter, E-mail or other photo albums/publishing service can actually already be used. The ball simply connects wirelessly to the users' smartphone (like for example the Go Pro cameras do already), the user then forwards the picture to the destination of choosing. That's the standard workflow of several other current cameras (Go Pro, as mentionned)
And wait for further product iteration to happen and the price will lower as production scale increases.
I can already see several fun possible uses.
Like taking picture of huge crowded outdoor events: you can snap instantly a picture of a music festival to capture the whole crowd ant the ambiance. The alternative would be using a quad-copter-mounted camera and flying it around to capture the whole experience (don't laugh, I've actually seen this exactly done this summer).
And if you want a big still image, the ball is still better than the quad-copter: it has a lot of cameras subdividing the space (36) all fired up at the same instant, meaning that the whole crowd will be seamlessly merged in to a huge panorama, without visible stichtes (whereas, with the drone, you either have a video, or a blurry/stiched panorama).
A phone would be completely useless (you need a high point of view) and again suffers from non-seamless panorama.
Another possible use: quickly taking clean panoramic picture of huge indoors.
Say you want a completely 360+ view of the inside of a cathedral.
You either quickly toss the ball (insta 360 view) or you need a complex setup with a fish-eye len and a pole-mount. (again, the POV needing to be in the middle of the architectural structure, phone aren't that much practical).
Or simply ease of use for taking conventional panoramas.
The ball can be simply handheld and takes an instant panorama,
whereas with a smart-phone you need to slowly take several shot (and thus risk of more aparent seams, due to motion of people/objects between shots.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Do you really want me to make a list of all the bullshit projects that have shown up on Kickstarter in the last few months?
Sure, if it makes you happy.
No guarantee that a successful project will ship anything either.
According to the updates and comments of the project you linked, it shipped. Tsk.
$700,000 for this?
Well, when 5000 people buy something in the ~$100 and above dollar range, yes, the result is a lot of money.
What are you whining about, are you jealous?