Canon Omnidirectional Camera Shoots Every Direction at Once

Canon is showing off all sorts of crazy hardware at Canon Expo 2010 over in NYC. One of them is an omnidirectional camera (shown above) that shoots a 360° photograph in a single exposure. It creates the seamless panoramas using a 50 megapixel CMOS sensor and an aspheric mirror.

Note that this is a 360 degree panorama on a single plane, as if you used a tripod and turned it in every direction. I wonder how long it will be until there’s a camera that can literally shoot in every direction (i.e. up and down) to create a spherical panorama with single exposures. Maybe we’ll have spherical sensors and cameras in the future that somehow levitate and beam photos wirelessly?

Image credit: Photograph by Gizmodo