An enterprising young computer engineer, Jonas Pfeil, who recently graduated with an M.Sc. from the Technical University of Berlin, will present his ‘Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera‘ as the Emerging Technologies demonstration at the SIGGRAPH Asia 2011.
Panoramic photography creates fascinating images. Very wide angle images are closer to the human field of view than conventional pictures. If seen through a panoramic viewer they let us experience a location as if we were there. Panoramic image stitching can create panoramas from pictures taken one after another. Unfortunately, acquiring the images takes a lot of time and moving objects may cause ghosting. It is also difficult to obtain a full spherical panorama, because the downward picture cannot be captured while the camera is mounted on the tripod.
This project presents a throwable panoramic camera that solves these problems. The camera is thrown into the air and captures an image at the highest point of flight – when it is hardly moving. The camera takes full spherical panoramas, requires no preparation and images are taken instantaneously. It can capture scenes with many moving objects without producing ghosting artifacts and creates unique images.
The camera uses 36 fixed-focus 2 megapixel mobile phone camera modules. The camera modules are mounted in a robust, 3D-printed, ball-shaped enclosure that is padded with foam and handles just like a ball. It contains an accelerometer that is used to measure launch acceleration. Integration enables the operator to predict rise time to the highest point, where the exposure tis triggered. After catching the ball camera, pictures are downloaded in seconds using USB and automatically shown in a spherical panoramic viewer. This lets users interactively explore a full representation of the captured environment.
[Could be interesting to combine this with the Unmanned Flying Ball from Japan that we featured in June. – Ed.]
Sources: YouTube, Web Site