Scientists say; "Toss this up!"

Taking a panoramic shot is now not a complicated job as it used to be. It is now as simple as tossing a ball in the air. The interesting part is; the image that is taken is not an ordinary panoramic shot.

Jonas Pfeil, a recent graduate of Technische Universtität of Berlin, created an amazing camera as his diploma thesis. A ball of size of a soccer ball, outfitted with 36 fixed-focus 2MP cameras, which can shoot spherical panoramic shots was the creation that he came up with.



How it works
First of all, this ball camera has to be tossed in the air. As soon as the ball begins to lift up, the built in accelerometer measures the initial acceleration, and predicts the time to the highest point of the motion of the ball. When the ball is at the zenith of its motion, where it becomes motionless, images are taken simultaneously by the 36 cameras. The "stitched" spherical panorama could be viewed using a specially created viewer software, once the images are downloaded from the ball camera to a computer via USB.



 Kristian Hildebrand, Carsten Gremzow, Bernd Bickel and Marc Alexa - the colleagues of Pfeil- also contributed to this creation, while the Computer Graphics Group of Berlin gave their support for this project.

For more information, go to http://jonaspfeil.de/ballcamera - The official web page