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CES 2014: Now You Can Make 360 Degree Videos With a Single Camera (Video)
The device that does this is the Geonaute 360 Degree Camera. The Geonaute display caught Tim Lord's eye at CES, and he got Geonauter (is that a word?) Marian Le Calves to show him the company's "action camera," which costs $499 -- or more accurately, will cost $499 when it starts shipping. Until then, you can pre-order. Or you could buy a GoPro camera for as little as $199. Geonaute has a bunch of videos on YouTube, some of which are quite fetching. But GoPo has a bunch of slick YouTube videos, too, and at this point they're the dominant brand in the action camera market niche. Will Geonaute be able to capture a decent market share with their 360 degree coolness -- and higher price? Or will they, GoPro, and other action camera vendors get into a price war so that every kid who has a skateboard can make good-looking videos?
Or...just spend $60 for a GoPano for iPhone
http://www.gopano.com/store/
I'd say the price war is on - $200-500 bucks for this gizmo already seems too high.
Seriously, there is nothing new here. The Ricoh Theta shoots 360-degree still panoramas and is available today.
https://theta360.com/en/
Oh, and it costs $100 less.
And then I re-read the headline. Shot too quick here, missed the fact it said "videos". I don't *think* Theta does those, although there's no reason it couldn't. (And there are other products already on the market which can.)
However, mod me down for being an idiot this time round; it's a fair cop.
Most of what makes for a good looking video has to do with subject tracking, slow pans, good lighting, image cropping to avoid distractions, sound quality and levels, and things you're never going to see from typical users of this device.
I'll wait for the 2040 rewrite, thanks.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Boring! Wake me up when it can do 360 x 360 degrees of video.
Then I'll be like, ZOMG! I can record video in every direction at ONCE!!!!
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Why would I want to see video of them using the device? I just want to see SAMPLE VIDEO that comes out of it.
So does it work better , worse, or the same as the free app for Android my buddy showed me the other day that does the same thing (actually, it may just be something built in, I didn't actually ask if it was an app).
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... do nothing. It's not launched yet. I hate how every year at CES, all of these vaporware or half-ass products are announced and demoed, and everybody acts like they are on the shelves as we speak. You won't ever see 90% of this crap.
Well, Geonaut, 360-degree camera, may be the first consumer electronic not driven by porn -- who he hell wants to see a bunch of fat film crew on the other side of the room with bulges in their pants?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
So this is supposedly the same company that makes cheap copies of Suunto/Garmin watches for the French budget sports chain Decathlon? Name and logo are identical. That is weird, because usually Decathlon sells slightly inferior products for a far lower price (which makes the Decathlon chain very popular with people that care more for outdoor sports than for appearances).
Just wait until someone shoots porn with it!
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
I did visual effects for the first four Fast and Furious movies. We did a lot of the car photography on a green-screen stage, and comped in backgrounds shot driving down streets. We used arrays of film cameras, usually Arri 435s (on Fast 2 we also used VistaVision cameras.)
These would be much simpler, cheaper, and more rugged.
There are similar cameras from Point Grey [ptgrey.com]. These have been out for quite some time. The Point Grey cameras are an order of magnitude more expensive than these vaporware cameras, though.
Thad
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But I have a Nikon D3100, you insensitive clod! Hmm. cheaper to get an iPhone.
...and mount a conical mirror with the apex inward, I'd say on a cutout lens cap. Very easily doable with superglue and a couple paperclips. In fact, it's been done with smartphones. I think there's one out for the iphone 4.
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I'd kill for a product like this that could be mounted to a pole on my roof and viewed in realtime with host software running on a PC (or Android tablet, if it had the horsepower to do the realtime deconvolution and virtual PTZ).
This would also turn it into a kick-ass security camera for places where aesthetics are less important than performance and cost
To keep the base cost low, they could make the ethernet+PoE an optional second module that the main one screws into and feeds the raw bitstream that would otherwise be written to microSD. Module #2 could handle the PoE (or passively-injected) power conversion and wrapping of raw (presumably h.264) data as UDP multicast (and forward error correction), as well as keeping the actual connection weatherproof. Inside the house, the host PC could then buffer the raw data for a few frames, then implement the virtual PTZ.
Enhancements that would make it even better for this purpose:
* optional "hat" mount to shield the 3 main cameras from rain, with fourth camera pointing up that has a pinhole-sized lens and strong blower to keep it clear of water (obviously you'd lose camera #4 during active rain, but the blower would clear away the water as soon as it stopped raining).
* vapor-tight shell to protect the electronics from night/morning dew in places like Florida, where 99% humidity condenses on just about everything left outdoors overnight. Or "very tight" shell, with a clump of silica gel and a moisture sensor so the user knows when he has to climb up onto the roof, grab the camera, open it up, and bake the silica gel in the oven for a few hours to make it useful again.