Take Perfect Panoramic Photos with the Eye Ball

[Greg Tito]

Take Perfect Panoramic Photos with the Eye Ball

No, it's not a deranged beholder out to kill the party, the Eye Ball is a prototype camera device.

Back when digital photography was new, I had friends that spent way too much time taking hundreds of shots and then stitching them together with PhotoShop to form a panoramic image. Even though applications exist which will take care of some of this for you, there still exists the problem of taking the right shots and from the right angle, especially when you are in an amazing vacation setting. One vacationer Jonas Pfeil at the Technische Universitat Berlin decided to take matters into his own hands - with the Eye Ball.

A foam-covered plastic ball covered with 36 cell phone cameras set for a 2 megapixel resolution, you use the Eye Ball by throwing it up as high as you can. The accelerometer inside detects when the the ball is at its apex, and snaps 32 photos simultaneously. Splitting the Ball apart reveals the micro-controller that - when connected to a computer via USB - will upload a 3D panoramic image that you can rotate and enlarge with custom-made software.


Pretty much everything about the softball-sized prototype built by Jonas Pfeil was designed carefully. The battery, easily the heaviest part of the device, was placed as close to the center of gravity as possible. The Eye Ball can store only one panoramic image right now, but expandable memory slots would allow it to hold more.

Pfeil is shopping around his designs and the prototype to see if anyone would want to market it commercially. As long as the cost was kept below $150, I could totally see this being sold in Brookstone to people who will never use it. Or maybe Sharper Image. Wait, no Hammacher Schlemmer.

Source: Technology Review [http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/39196/]



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[CezarIgnat]

It's an interesting concept...but the image quality isn't that great imo...it has a green tint on all the captured images and I don't know what sensors they used to keep it lower than $150, but I doubt the resolution would be that great.

Still...it has potential and I can see the fun in taking panoramas this way. Though, for the average tourist, I don't think it's portable enough.

 

[Mad Hamish]

I think I've seen something like this in a science fiction show. A character threw a sphere up into the air and when it came down it had a map of the terrain. This thing is pretty neat though.

 

[redisforever]

This will be really useful to VFX artists, who need a 360 degree view around the object for environment maps. (reflections)

Also, I would really want one, if it stored more than one picture.

 

[gyroscopeboy]

Make it waterproof and floating and you have a winner

 

[uguito-93]

When the camera has to be thrown to work i can see it going horribly wrong. I'm paranoid enough about dropping my camera when taking photo in high place, I cant' imagine how I'll feel when I have throw the damn thing.

 

[Smiles]

I saw this on vsauce like months ago...

 

[Jingle Fett]

As someone who does CGI work....I WANT THIS NOW

 

[CrystalShadow]

It's an interesting concept...but the image quality isn't that great imo...it has a green tint on all the captured images and I don't know what sensors they used to keep it lower than $150, but I doubt the resolution would be that great.

Still...it has potential and I can see the fun in taking panoramas this way. Though, for the average tourist, I don't think it's portable enough.

The prototype probably costs a lot more than $150. That's just someone speculating on what it would need to cost to be worth buying.

If I'm reading the article correctly, it creates a panoramic image from 32 simultaneous pictures, which each seem to come from a 2 megapixel camera.

(It's 36 cameras, actually, according to the video.)


That puts the overall resolution of the final image at around 64 megapixels, though depending on how the images are combined, and the degree of overlap involved, it may be somewhat less than that.

I agree that the colour tint on the pictures is quite bad, but since it seems quite constant, it looks like a configuration problem. (Probably not correctly accounting for the fact that most digital imaging sensors have twice the number of green pixels as red and blue).

Fairly basic image processing can correct a defect like that quite quickly. Obviously, for a commercial product that'd be best done by adjusting the onboard image processing algorithms, but it's hardly a huge problem.

Only being able to take one picture at a time is clearly an issue with the prototype design, but I doubt it's difficult to fix.

I'd say a device that can capture a 64 megapixel panoramic image quickly and easily is hardly useless. But of course, cost does become something of an issue.