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Comment by rogers18445 | Hacker News Reader

If the article writer is concerned about some helicopter footage, he would have an aneurysm over this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJLr0KMsRAA

AFAIK this was done with commercially mass produced silicon, and it was 10+ years ago. Nowadays they can probably do 10x+ better.

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Yea, the overlays are the least-worst thing there. Imagine what they do with the 2TB of videos (or more) that they are storing! They could run all kinds of analytics on that data, with time/location tracking included in there. Someday, you won't even have to pan + zoom a camera turret and will just digitally pan + zoom, because there will be cameras covering everything below the helicopter in great detail at all times. Imagine doing facial rec on it all, knowing where anyone was that was within ~500 meters of any police helicopter. Now, imagine you remove the requirement that the helicopter has a pilot, just run drones all over the place with charging terminals.

Instead of planes, why not used a tethered balloon with a 360 camera, and direct fiberoptic cable to the ground. Curious how high a balloon like this could go up before it exceeded the weight and strength limits of the filament line.

Looks like your answer is about 3,000 feet. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/cbp-deploy-...

Okay great thanks, so a consumer 1200mm lens can zoom upto 8 miles. But I guess under 45 degree angle, you would only get about 4500 feet horizontal range

Even ten years ago there were much much higher quality versions of this same concept: https://youtu.be/QGxNyaXfJsA

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