This week’s Technology Review, published by MIT, has a hack article about the Eyeball. It is described as, “a globe studded with cameras captures a panorama if you throw it in the air.”
If you toss this foam-covered ball skyward, an accelerometer inside determines when it has reached its maximum height. At that moment, 36 cameras are triggered simultaneously, creating a mosaic that can be downloaded and viewed on a computer as one spherical panoramic image. The ball was created by researchers at the Technische Universität Berlin after one of them, Jonas Pfeil, labored to create panoramas while on vacation in Tonga. On that trip, he tried a cumbersome process that required snapping pictures in different directions and stitching them together later in a photo-editing program. Now he hopes to license the camera-ball technology for commercial production.
Full article here: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/39196/
Karen Blumberg 