Gabriel Paez is like a one-man Google Street View. On September 21, 2012, the panoramic videographer and iPhone hacker set out from Seaside, Oregon on a journey across the United States to Portland, Maine. Carrying him from place to place was Pucho, his 2005 Vespa PX150 scooter. Strapped to his back was a giant panoramic camera rig designed to capture 360-degree video footage of his adventure “for a live stage show” he’s working on. Read more…
360° interactive photographs of products are a great way for online merchants to increase their conversion rates — people apparently feel more comfortable buying things if they can see what it looks like all the way around — but creating those views can be a pain. Enter RotaryView’s new CupChair, a simple app that greatly simplifies the process by taking care of most of the steps for you. Read more…
Google Street View is interesting from a photographical perspective because it is, essentially, the largest compilation of 360-degree images in existence. Photographer Michael Wolf even used it to get a different perspective on over-photographed Paris. The best photos on Street View, however, weren’t actually taken in the street. They come from endeavors like Google’s World Wonders project, which takes you on 360-degree tours of famous and often inaccessible locations. Read more…
Mike Warren has written up an in-depth tutorial on how you can build a 360° camera hat using 6-8 disposable cameras. The cameras are worn around the head like a crown, and are simultaneously trigger using a single shutter release with the help of servo motors that depress the shutter when triggered. Warren writes,
With the camera array sitting on your head, you’re able to capture a 360° panorama view of your surroundings. This project requires no special electronics knowledge and can be assembled in about an hour.
I designed this camera array off something I saw on the “Radar Detector” music video by Darwin Deez. But, after making the camera hat, everyone kept asking if it was a low-fi version of Google Street View. It’s more the former than the latter, but people can draw their own interpretations.
Photographer Randy Scott Slavin creates spherical panoramic photographs of various cityscapes and landscapes. He makes the surreal images by shooting hundreds of photographs of a scene and then stitching them together into a stereographic projection. He calls the work Alternate Perspectives. Slavin writes,
The photographing of the images is the actually least time consuming part of the process. What takes the longest is finding the places that are worthy of shooting and getting to the spot that’s best to shoot them from. You can’t light landscapes so it’s important to figure out what the best time of day is to take a photograph. Sometimes this means long hours of waiting and watching.
Light painting and bullet time are both amazing photographic techniques on their own, but what happens when you combine them? The amazing video above by Richard Kendall and his team shows just that: three dimensional light painting captured with a 360-degree Matrix-style bullet time camera rig. The results are stunning.
If you enjoyed the beautiful 360-degree helicopter ride video we shared earlier today, then Condition One is an iPad app for you. It uses immersive video as a way to pull viewers into news stories — viewers control the camera by simply moving their iPad around!
The Condition ONE app gives users the ability to look in any direction while viewing footage. By pivoting and tilting the iPad, one literally manipulates the corresponding field of view. The highly sensitive motion controls produce the illusion of looking through a window into another reality, giving a visceral sense of ‘being there’.
Condition ONE will offer highly engaging storytelling with a focus on visual content conducive to being experienced firsthand.
It’s available as a free app through the iTunes store (with an Android version coming next year), so what are you waiting for?
The camera is thrown into the air and captures an image at the highest point of flight – when it is hardly moving. The camera takes full spherical panoramas, requires no preparation and images are taken instantaneously. It can capture scenes with many moving objects without producing ghosting artifacts and creates unique images.
It uses 36 separate 2-megapixel mobile phone camera modules, which are mounted in an enclosure that’s padded with foam. Photographs can then be downloaded to a computer via USB and viewed in a spherical panoramic viewer. Video after the jump
Six months after the atomic bomb “Little Boy” was dropped on Hiroshima, three American photographers and one Japanese photographer shot panoramas from five different locations to document the devastation. Mari Shimomura of the Hiroshima Peace Museum recently gave high-resolution scans of these panoramas to 360cities founder Jeffrey Martin, who then turned them into these 360-degree panoramas. It’s a stark and unsettling reminder of something that will hopefully never happen again. Read more…
Ken Murphy created this time-lapse showing an entire 360-degree view overlooking San Francisco using only a single camera:
The camera (a Canon A590 with CHDK installed) snapped an image every five seconds while the motorized mount slowly rotated, making a single rotation in 90 minutes. I assembled the images into this panoramic movie, in which each “pane” is actually the same movie, slightly offset in time. The panes combine to make a single 360-degree view. [#]
