Throwable camera balls and their ilk might be all shiny and cool, but what if you want to grab high-quality 360-degree images with the camera you already have in your bag?
Enter Eye Mirror, a startup launched by U.K. inventors Dan Burton and Thomas Seidl, whose namesake product attaches to just about any camera and allows it to shoot 360-degree panoramas and videos.
"Here, boy! Go fetch the camera! Good dog!" Such conversations could become commonplace as panoramic camera balls threaten to become the next offbeat photography meme. Squito appeared on the scene in July, Bubl Technology is already well on its way to producing the Bublcam, and now comes the Panono, which launched its Indiegogo fundraising campaign today.
Sometimes, taking a straight-on photograph is exactly what the situation calls for. But what about those moments when you want a more complete view? What happens when you want to capture everything around you, all at once, in a snapshot or video that is as interactive as Google's Street View? Well, that's when you reach for the Bublcam.
When you first see the all-new Ricoh Theta, it might remind you a bit of those old Apple remotes. But this is no remote, it's a new-fangled camera that can snap 360-degree panoramas in one click -- no swiping or stitching required -- with some help from the free companion iOS app (Android coming later this year).
You remember that one time when you wanted to put four of your 16:9 aspect ratio wide-screen TVs side by side and watch the game in super-panorama? Yeah, neither do we. But apparently Panasonic does, considering the 64:9 ultra-wide camera system the company has developed.
There seems to be a growing desire among the networks to give sports fans the absolute best angle of the action when they're watching a game on TV, but what angle is that?
Sunday Night Football is tackling the problem by giving fans every angle with the newly installed FreeD system, but researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute are taking a different approach. With their new OmniCam360, they intend to give you both 360° views as well as the ability to choose whatever angle you like best.
The launch of Android 4.2 in October of last year brought with it the ability to create special 360° panoramas called "Photo Spheres." But as cool as these panoramas were, there was no real way to share them with the exception of a widget Google released a few months back.
Yesterday, all of that changed when Google announced a brand new Google Maps website called Views, built from the ground up for the Android community and their many un-shared Photo Spheres.
Boston-based artist and inventor Steve Hollinger has just been granted a second patent here in the United States for his Squito invention, a ball sporting embedded cameras and position sensors that allow for panoramic imagery in reconnaissance and recreational situations.
Just a few days old, a new Kickstarter project called "Spinpod" is aiming to improve your panoramic photos and videos through the use of a spinning pod designed for smaller cameras such as smartphones, GoPros and so forth.
We recently introduced you to some gorgeous wide-angle photos of the interior of La Sagrada Família that were taken by photographer Clement Celma. These photos revealed Celma's love of gorgeous architecture, but they're far from his only expression of it.
Another of his photo series, called Mes Petite Planètes, literally translated "My Little Planets," takes a more interactive and panoramic approach, exploring beautiful architecture from all angles.
Last month, the Library of Congress finally finished a project they started all the way back in 2008: they finished digitizing an archive of 467 panoramic postcards from the early 1900's. All of these postcards are now available online for interested folks to peruse through, learn from and enjoy.
Want to explore famous New York City locations without leaving the comfort of your chair? Check out photographer Nuno Madeira's New York City 360 project. It's like browsing Google Street View panorama photographs on steroids.
The latest panorama sent down by NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover is unique in more ways than one. Not only is it a panorama taken on another planet (still blows our minds), it's also been subjected to some post production. The photo -- a piece of which is seen above -- has actually had its white balance modified by NASA to make it look more like it was taken on Earth.
German photographer Thomas Kellner creates large-scale panoramas of famous locations using
When the Mars Rover Opportunity was nearing its 9th year in the Martian sun, we shared a beautiful panoramic landscape shot of the red planet taken by the aging rover. It makes sense then that Curiosity would eventually send down a panorama of its own. But just like you would expect from a younger generation of rover, it couldn't help but make the pano a selfie.
The BT Tower panorama, created by stitching together 48,640 images taken with 7 Canon EOS 7Ds, has officially broken the record for the world's largest panoramic photo. It was taken from atop the BT Tower in London, and you can see a tiny version of it at the top, but the real thing offers a massive, browsable 360-degree view of London in extreme detail.
At the CP+ show in Japan, Ricoh is showing off a new camera prototype its developing that can capture full 360-degree immersive photographs with a singel push of the shutter. The omnidirectional camera looks like a cross between an electric toothbrush and a hammerhead shark. Lift it up into the air, press a button, and it will capture an image that shows every direction around you.
Have you always wanted to see what the world looks like from the top of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest manmade structure in the world? Dubai, UAE-based photographer Gerald Donovan was recently given the opportunity of shooting a photograph from the peak of the massive skyscraper. Not just any ol' photograph, mind you, but an immersive 360-degree panorama that makes you feel like you're actually there!
New York City is undoubtedly one of the most photographed cities on Earth, but photographer Richard Silver doesn't let that fact faze him. He's on a personal mission to capture facets of The Big Apple in ways people have never seen before. A month ago, we shared his New York Sliced series, which consists of spliced photos of buildings that show day turning into night.
Silver has now followed that project up with a new one titled, NY Churches, which documents the various churches in NYC through beautiful (and disorienting) vertical panoramas.
Google has already photographed quite a bit of our world using a fleet of cars, submarine-style cameras, tricycles, and snowmobiles, so what else is there to include in Street View? Places where vehicles can't go, of course. The company has begun capturing 360-degree imagery using the Trekker -- a special backpack with a Street View camera rig sticking up from the top.
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.
If you've always wanted to go scuba diving at the Great Barrier Reef but haven't had a chance to, this might be one of the next best things: Google has added gorgeous underwater panoramic photographs to Street View, allowing to swim around at the world's largest coral system as if it were a street in your neighborhood.
Back in 2011, it was discovered that iPhones, iPods, and iPads running iOS 5 had a hidden panorama feature that was built into the operating system but not ordinarily available through the devices. Methods were discovered for unlocking the feature, which we all assumed was simply a half-baked feature that wasn't ready for release at the time.
It seems that Apple engineers have been busy polishing the feature in the 10 months since then, as the panorama feature was announced yesterday at the iPhone 5's unveiling. For those of you who are content with your iOS 5 device, here's some good news for you: iPhone 4S users will get the new panorama mode as well when iOS 6 is rolled out on September 19th, 2012.
We've featured large format LEGO cameras before, but what about wide format? Photographer Giacomo Citti created this panoramic LEGO pinhole camera that features a sliding shutter and film winders on the sides.
Scientists at Duke University have created a digital camera that boasts a whopping 50 gigapixels. The camera, dubbed AWARE-2, uses 98 separate 14-megapixel microcameras and a special spherical lens. Each microcamera captures a tiny portion of the scene and a specially designed processor stitches the images together. Processing the data is so hardware intensive that 97% of the camera is made up of electronics and computer components (the other 3% is the optical elements).
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.
NASA has released a gigantic catalog of …
Creating tiny planets by projecting panoramic photographs onto a sphere is something you've probably seen before, but Dutch photographer Wouter van Buuren creates his planets a bit differently. rather than shoot panoramas from the ground, van Buuren climbs to the top of towers, cranes, skyscrapers, and bridges and points his camera in every direction below. He then takes the resulting photographs and arranges them into compact worlds.
Check out this incredible 360-degree video by northStudio360, titled "The Nimmo Bay Experience". They attached the camera(s) to the bottom of a helicopter, and flew through some incredibly beautiful landscapes. Simply click and drag to move the camera's direction.
Developer Conrad Kramer was poking around in iOS 5 when he stumbled upon …
The 'Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera' is an awesome new camera developed by a group of computer science researchers led by Jonas Pfeil.
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. [#]
Microsoft's jaw-dropping Photosynth technology has arrived on the iPhone as an app that allows you to easily create immersive 360-degree panoramas. All you need to do is load up the app and sweep your camera around in every direction, and the app automatically snaps photographs filling in the panoramic image (you can also tap it if it gets sluggish with its snapping).
Check out this bizarre looking homemade medium format camera spotted by tokyo camera style on the streets of Tokyo, Japan. That bizarre glass bulb you see sticking out of it is the 360 degree lens that projects panoramic views onto the 120 film inside the camera.
Lens attachments for the iPhone 4 already exist, but the GoPano micro is a bit different — it’s a …
Chris Kotsiopoulos of GreekSky created this mind-boggling panoramic photo of the sky that …
Jeffrey Martin spent three days shooting a massive 80 gigapixel panorama of London, …
This contraption is essentially a glorified egg timer with a tripod screw designed to allow for easy 360 degree time lapse images. The Camalapse, designed by video gear rental and retailer Camarush, slowly rotates in a full circle. If paired with a camera's time-lapse feature, it can allow for pretty seamless, panning 360 degree time-lapse over an hour. You can also stitch resulting time-lapse photos together to make a 360 degree panoramic.
At the Glastonbury Festival this past weekend, a giant panoramic photograph containing 70,000+ attendees was snapped during the halftime of an England World Cup match. Afterward, the photo was put online and opened up to tagging via Facebook Connect. Since then, over 2,500 faces in the photograph have been tagged, making it (unofficially) the most tagged photo in the world.
Dermandar is a free flash-based web app that will automatically and seamlessly stitch …