If it can be stabilised in the air then great, but you'd see nothing if a spin bowler were to throw it.
Inventor lobs spherical, throwable camera
Imagine for a moment that you’re a fire fighter and want to know if your stream of water is hitting the hot spot. The fire prevents you from getting anywhere near your spurting jet’s landing point, so you spray and hope. Now imagine the fire fighter possesses a cheap, spherical, camera he or she could throw into the flames, …
-
-
Wednesday 10th July 2013 14:21 GMT Eddy Ito
I think it would handle the spin rather easily. I assume it uses technology similar to that used in DARPA's Samarai UAV by Lockheed which produces some rather impressive video considering it's little more than a single rotor blade.
-
-
-
Wednesday 10th July 2013 09:44 GMT Dave 126
Re: Not new though
That's not prior art with respect to this patent.
Mr Hollinger's patent is for HOW the thing works: "the processing unit instructing the camera to capture an image in response to an electrical signal generated by the at least one position sensor and the at least one orientation sensor. " - http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=8477184.PN.&OS=PN/8477184&RS=PN/8477184
i.e, the frame rate of the camera isn't fixed, but is triggered by by position and orientation sensors.
If you read through the patent, you will see a summary of prior related art and how his device differs.
-
-
-
Wednesday 10th July 2013 08:14 GMT stu 4
interesting - but I'm sure something similar was out a few year ago
Plus, for most of the possible use cases, a small quadcopter would be better.
For example - the fire use case - has your 'spherical camera' landing in the middle of the fire - so you're gonna go through a lot of camera.
With the new brushless gimbal controller that have just came out, footage from quadcopters (like mine) has become incredibly stable - stable enough that they can even be used with zoom lens camera for example.
For example (no zoom but shows stability of footage):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svDJU0gBWBg
These can be built for around 250 quid now - are very easy to fly, and in most cases (e.g. search and rescue, fires, etc) would be far better than the spherical camera I'd have thought.
-
Wednesday 10th July 2013 10:59 GMT Don Jefe
Re: interesting - but I'm sure something similar was out a few year ago
Flying lightweight things over or near fire doesn't work well. The rising heat blows small craft all over the place in a highly unpredictable fashion, far faster than onboard stabilization systems can cope with. The same is true of full size craft too. Fire is hard to fly around.
-
-
-
-
Wednesday 10th July 2013 10:58 GMT Alan 6
Re: Nice idea but
You sure about that?
Thermal cameras show differences in temperature, the wall will be pretty hot due to the fire, and the stream of water will be cold, leading to a huge difference in temperature, which will show through the wall, it won't be a high resolution image, but it will show if the water is hitting in the right place.
Disaster recovery teams use thermal cameras to find survivors after earthquakes and building collapses, a living person will show through a fairly big pile of rubble when using a cooled sensor thermal camera...
-
Wednesday 10th July 2013 11:46 GMT Charles 9
Re: Nice idea but
For the fire scenario, you're forgetting the rest of the blaze going on which can cause incidental heating of the surrounding area. Also, the fire itself is usually at temperature beyond the useable range of IR systems (think over 1000 degrees when its high end is in the 500s). This would mean that most of the house is in the high end of the scale if not beyond it, even when you start getting the water down, so IR may not get you a quick-enough reaction. Plus, infrared has one nasty quirk—it doesn't transmit well through glass.
IR is used in rescue scenarios that don't involve fire because the buildings in the other cases are cool, making human body heat stand out on the person and whatever they touch. They're also handy for people lost in wooded areas or around water (or in inclement weather). I'd be curious to know its utility in avalanches.
-
Wednesday 10th July 2013 12:21 GMT Dave 126
Re: Nice idea but
>IR is used in rescue scenarios that don't involve fire because the buildings in the other cases are cool, making human body heat stand out on the person and whatever they touch.
There was a recent example of a IR-equipped quadropter being used by a fire brigade in England this year, to find (and successfully rescue) a person from a fast-moving flooded river.
-
-
Wednesday 10th July 2013 13:22 GMT Gideon 1
Re: Nice idea but
Yes, I'm sure, my work is developing thermal cameras. Thermal cameras show thermal radiation, from which actual temperatures can be inferred, not just differences in temperature. Walls and glass windows are opaque to thermal wavelengths, the wall will show a cold patch if the cold water is directly hitting and cooling the wall.
The heat from a person gradually spreads through the rubble through both conduction, convection and draughts. Thermal cameras can resolve very small temperature differences, in the order of 10s of milliKelvin, allowing you to see these effects.
-
Wednesday 10th July 2013 13:34 GMT Charles 9
Re: Nice idea but
"the wall will show a cold patch if the cold water is directly hitting and cooling the wall."
Unless there's another fire between you and the wall you're actually trying to hit. Firefighters trying to attempt a rescue will want to focus their water efforts on creating a rescue lane to allow them to reach people trapped inside (to firefighters, people come before property). The further in you go, the less one can rely on direct line of sight, which is there having an eye further inside may be of use (you can throw it in before it's deemed safe for actual people to go in). This also has an advantage over a quadcopter in that it has no trouble with confined spaces.
-
-
-
-
-
Wednesday 10th July 2013 11:04 GMT Don Jefe
New Hampshire
The U.S. government has been messing with this stuff for years at the Arctic Research Support and Logistics facility in New Hampshire. They are dropped from low altitude aircraft though and they don't have the software stitching, they do have microphones though and destroy themselves after the batteries run low.
-
Wednesday 10th July 2013 12:04 GMT Suricou Raven
Bad example.
Radio doesn't work very well in fire. Fire is, surprisingly, actually a conductor of electricity. Test it if you want - get a flame and poke multimeter probes into it, measure resistance. Blue flame works better.
You can get voice through, but high-bitrate digital isn't going to be at all reliable.