Flying 360° panoramic camera poised for lift-off

Re: 36 cameras

I was thinking the same thing. Using wide fisheye lenses, this could technically be accomplished with as few as six cameras. You would need high quality lenses to avoid blurriness at the edges though, which would increase the cost, and such lenses would need to protrude from the surface of the device, making them likely to get broken. 12, or maybe 16 cameras with just moderately-wide lenses would be more practical. However, I suspect the creators of the device were looking to keep costs down, and as such, they appear to be using lower-end off-the-shelf cell phone cameras, which tend to have a rather narrow field of view. In bulk, such cameras might only cost a few dollars or so each, so using 36 of them may actually cost less than using fewer cameras with wide-angle lenses added.

This is a neat idea, though the image quality doesn't seem particularly great. The combined resolution is good, but the images appear prone to exhibiting blown highlights and color casts. I also suspect that most tosses will result in unusably blurry images, and that the "tough clear plastic case" won't survive a missed catch over a hard surface. They really should have made the areas between lenses out of a soft foam or rubberized honeycomb material, seeing as the device is intended to be thrown. It does provide an interesting view with minimal effort though, so I'm sure many will be willing to overlook the fact that it's a $500+ camera with mediocre image quality. If one were willing to do some manual editing in an image stitching program, better results could be achievable with multiple shots from a regular camera on a tripod, though of course getting a top-down view would be harder, and you wouldn't be able to capture an instantaneous moments in all directions.

The distortion in that image is because they stretched a 360 degree view into a flat rectangular image. There's no way to get around that short of viewing the image in spherical form. It's similar to how a flat map of the world greatly distorts the shape and size of landmasses the closer you get to the edges, while a globe does not. The only way to fully get around that in a continuous image is to map it to a sphere. For panoramas, a sphere can be simulated on-screen showing only a portion of the image at a time, such as with QTVR, or the similar tablet app shown in their video. So long as the field of view is set correctly, edge-distortion shouldn't be noticeable when viewed that way. You can't expect to have a flat photograph showing everything around you without significant distortion though.

Re: apogee

As soon as it leaves the thrower''s hand it is decelerating all the way up, until it reaches the highest point when deceleration turns into acceleration due to gravity. Briefly there would be no measurable deceleration or acceleration. Presumable that is what the camera-triggering sensors detect.

I wonder if the sensors would work at the highest point of a more gradual transition during an arc trajectory, such as if you threw the ball to a friend?