Ultra cool 360-video format. HOW is this done?

[Magnus von Rosen]

[moderator edited: added photo and link to Panorama Viewer site] Cool stuff.

krpano Panorama Viewer

The video says it all. Better than 3D, steer the video yourself!

This, on a multicopter would be WOW!

http://www.spiegel.de/static/360grad/kamtschatka/

KR

Magnus, Sweden

[Magnus von Rosen]

Thank you for adding that moderator. :)

I still don't understand. Does the software piece together several video streams, or did they setup something like 4-8 cameras taking stills, and piece those together?

/M

[Peter Meister]

Whatever they did - that is AWESOME! Man could you imagine that ability on our quads or planes....very cool!

[R_Lefebvre]

I'm guessing they use a high resolution camera, and a CRAZY fisheye lens, facing up, and then rectify it digitally afterwards.  Either that, or super-high frame rate, and they have a mirror spinning around collecting images from all directions sequentially.

I've seen something just like this before.  Red Bull had one of these on the helmet of a mountain biker.  You could see that if you tried to look down, there was just a 2D image of the helmet.  But it was pretty cool.

[LanMark]

How exactly is that camera attached to the helicopter?

[criro1999]

Not sure what camera did they use, but you can have 4 x GoPro and do similar, see link below.

http://punkoryan.com/2011/02/08/shooting-360-degree-video-with-four...

[John Church]

Camera pointing at a shiny globe?

[Ruwan]

e.g. http://ww2.ptgrey.com/products/ladybug5/ 

[Ruwan]

I shoot 360 panoramas using a normal DSLR, 8mm fisheye lens and a pano head. But never did videos! 

My Pano's can be found at : http://www.sirilaka.org/360/

[Magnus von Rosen]

Yes, the video is a whole other dimension. 

Ladybug, very interesting but probably not for us hobbyists unless we win the lottery.

I was just thinking, 4x Gopros filming HD at 30fps, one in each direction. (Perhaps 3 would be enough).

Extract stills from the video streams, Thats 4 streams of 30 jpg's each second. Then let the software stich those together, 4 at a time into one jpg for each frame. Then take those 30 jpgs for each second and paste together into a video stream. Voila'?

Might not work in reality...I'm tempted to look into the concept using what cams I have at hand. I can probably muster up 2-3 GoPros from friends! 

This will take some looking into...

[Luke Olson]

There's a single vertical seam opposite the helicopter and some areas are sharp while others are extremely pixelated. Based on those things it looks like they used a mirror ball like this one.

http://www.gopano.com/products/gopano-plus#page=technology

In the past I've used them for photography and those kinds of artifacts were typical in the final shots.