Beside that, this could revolutionize security technology. how often do you see a person pass from one camera to another in a blind spot. If there is a few of these cameras that a security person can click and drag to follow on, it could be a valuable tool.

the sports angle is also another area that could really benefit from this technology.

It is essentially useless for narrative filmmaking though.

Streaming in-car racecam.

Reaps on March 14, 2008 at 1:11 AM

Holy Crap! – Strong Bad

Imagine floating one of this down over a basketball game. Like you’re right on the court dude and 9 feet tall.

Imagine being able to access 360 views on the top of Everest, or on a coral reef (like in the movie). Would people pay to access this kind of scenery? Hell, stick one on the Moon (of course, nothing really moves there).

What about sports events? A centrally-placed camera where you can decide what to look at, not the cameraman. Maybe even that one girl in the bleachers jumping up and down.

Take some time…bet you can all think of some applications yourselves.

Next step is to improve resolution, and maybe figure out some kind of zoom. Or make a helmet that steers the view with your head.

Which types of filmmakers could conceivably find this useful?

Streaming in-car racecam.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no lens in existence that can capture a complete 360 degree arc like that to a single CCD input source. At least, not without MASSIVE image distortion. (imagine looking through a glass sphere. stuff in the center is almost normal, but everything else is a stretched out blur.)

Bell Labs invented something like it about a dozen years ago, before Lucent tried to cure its recession hangover with last-year’s-products cyanide. The camera gets a 360-degree cylindrical view, but not a full sphere. The trick is a pyramidal mirror, with the camera looking down (or up) at the apex. It’s not a full pyramid but a frustrum, and I image that with suffiently good software you could make it work with a conical pyramid as well.

Whether this is done with that technology I couldn’t say.

As for utility, one application I think that would do well is video feeds to sports bars. Just think about watching a game and being able to aim the camera where you want. A bit of TIVO, and you can replay the action and look anywhere on the field. People would pay some serious cash for that.

I think they’re looking more at surveillance / security. Put one of these on a post and you can look at anywhere, instantly, because the camera pan is purely virtual. And again, if you see something suspicious off in the corner, rewind and look right at it. The guys are also trying to hook up with 3D modelers so that rather than touching camera controls, you pick a point on a map and tell the video system “show me this”.

The camera head is one unified camera system made up of 11 lenses and sensors configured according to a dodecahedro

HERE is the camera description page.

Cool stuff!

The camera spins around in a circle while creating a long contiguous image file. Software is then used “stitch” the image together into a single 360 degree image afterwards. One company used to hold the patent on this, but lost it’s patent in a court battle that ultimately sunk the company. Now other companies are picking up the slack and making use of the technology.

HOWEVER, this is something entirely different. These are video images, and I have no clue how they get them, other than perhaps two (or more) fish-eye lensed mini-cams back to back mounted on some kind of (apparently waterproof) headgear or transportable stand. They must use some kind of specialized software (possibly some they wrote themselves) to stitch the video together later. But it has to be more than a single camera. To the best of my knowledge, there is no lens in existence that can capture a complete 360 degree arc like that to a single CCD input source. At least, not without MASSIVE image distortion. (imagine looking through a glass sphere. stuff in the center is almost normal, but everything else is a stretched out blur.)

Very interesting technology. Oh, and absolutely “dude”worthy.

Unlimited angles while watching porn!

Some variation on this theme was inevitable.

And why not?

Couple that with this and you just might have something.

ChrisM on March 13, 2008 at 4:49 PM

Johnny Lee’s work is involving pure mathematical 3D models; the tech in the OP’s video is using an omnidirectional camera, so all you have is flat imagery (360 degrees of it, pseudo-spherical, like an uber panoramic photo). You’d need extra 3D information from the filmed scenes to do the view-dependent rendering that Johnny Lee’s stuff is doing.

This [MPG file] could do it, though. Science here.

Welcome to the new world, folks. It’s changing fast.

Neat, spherical VR only instead of a staic image you have a movie.

LordDaMan on March 13, 2008 at 4:55 PM

Yup. Me likey.

- The Cat

Couple that with this and you just might have something.

ChrisM on March 13, 2008 at 4:49 PM

now, that’s impressive; one way they could alleviate the two person view problem is by giving each person a (very large) monitor; I wonder how much tolerance there is for minor deviation–maybe it would still work with small variations in a movie theater to make really good 3D

as far as this wrap around view, I’ve seen stuff like that years ago in web car ads that let you see the whole interior–apartments/houses too; the only difference here is that the camera is moving