All-seeing ball snaps panoramas in mid-air

Melissae Fellet, contributor

Throw a typical camera in the air and you're unlikely to capture anything stunning. But now a new ball-shaped camera, created by Jonas Pfeil from the Technical University of Berlin and colleagues, is designed to be tossed upwards to snap panoramas in mid-air.

The rubber ball, which contains 36 cellphone cameras, barely moves at the highest point of its trajectory so the photos it captures aren't blurred by movement. A built-in accelerometer measures in-flight speed to detect this stationary point and trigger the cameras. Software then stitches the pictures together into a spherical panoramic image.

The team developed the system to simplify panoramic photography, which normally involves painstakingly connecting several different images.

The ball will be demonstrated at Siggraph Asia, a conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, from December 13-15 in Hong Kong.

If you enjoyed this post, check out an off-the-shelf camera that was hacked to capture high-speed video or see how a handheld device can see through objects.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/1a8ad951/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cnstv0C20A110C110Call0Eseeing0Eball0Esnaps0Epanoramas0Ein0Emid0Eair0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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