Friday, December 16, 2011

Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera

[Thanks to Ian] 
To be frank I'm not impressed with the quality of the stitching of the images, but it's early days and it's all done in-camera and in a cheap one, so...



Anyway, I think it's a good example of how cheap electronics is changing a field and making things which we could not imagine a few years ago.

Another example: a couple of years ago, William Gibson had as an essential plot element in his book Zero History (written in 2009), lighter-than-air toy ballons with cameras, they silently "swam" through the air like a fish through water, one of them shaped like a manta ray. You controlled them with an iPhone app. In the book these were very expensive cutting-edge things, but now, just a couple years later, you can buy such things on a healthy Christmas-present budget.