Just toss the ball in the air and it will shoot a full, 360-degreee panorama. Photo Jonas Pfeil
Imagine spending the time to take 36 perfectly spaced photographs and then later combining them into a fully scrollable 360-degree panoramic image. Now imaging doing the exact same thing, only instead of all that tedious work, you just toss a football-sized ball into the air.
This is just what the Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera can do. Developed by Jonas Pfeil, Kristian Hildebrand, Carsten Gremzow, Bernd Bickel and Marc Alexa of the Computer Graphics Group in Berlin, the ball automates everything but the actual throwing.
Arranged around the ball are 36 2-megapixel fixed-focus cellphone cameras. When the ball is thrown, they fire simultaneously at the apex of the ball’s flight, capturing the scene in every direction (and including the photographer). Back at the lab (or home), you pull the images off via USB and view them in custom software developed by the team.
The result is somewhat akin to Google Street View, only more spectacular. This video shows it in action:
Because all the cameras in the 3-D printed foam-padded ball fire together, there is no ghosting between images. And because it is airborne, it can even fire downwards — something impossible if mounted in a tripod.
I’d love to play with this. I’d also love to see a video version, although the processing involved in stitching 360-degree movies together might make this less practical. Still, these pan-able panoramas are pretty awesome as it is.
Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera [Jonas Pfeil via Petapixel]
No comments:
Post a Comment