I sent a balloon up to capture 360x180 degree imagery/video from 100K feet | Hacker News Reader

I sent a balloon up to capture 360x180 degree imagery/video from 100K feet

robotrising.org

252 pointsRobotCaleb39 comments

FYI to folks considering this, there are absolutely laws that can impact you should you attempt this.

It's called FAA FAR 101 (FAR101): http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?c=ecfr&rgn=div5&...

You should be aware of the risks and proper handling of something that would be dangerous for commercial aircraft or people below.

I know the whole "Big Sky" theory, but eventually if enough people do this, it's gonna get hit by a jet.

Ingestion of this at 30,000 ft will wreck an engine or wrap around control surfaces, potentially rendering them inoperable. Those would probably be recoverable, but if it sheared off pitot tubes in just the right way - it could be a disaster.

I hate to be a wet blanket but - although these images are stunning - it's not something we should be doing without serious consideration of the possible risks or taking the appropriate precautions.

Are you referring to any high-altitude balloon projects (of which there are many dozens), or is there something specific about this project that you have an issue with?

You are correct. There are regulations you must follow. To the best of my knowledge, I was in line with them.

NOAA has been doing this for years and launches ~75,000 per year. (According to another statistic I saw, 800 of them are released worldwide very day. That's nearly 300,000 per year.)

I'm glad you are aware of the Big Sky theory, as that is what I would have pointed you to.

If someone does intend to do this, a call to the FAA letting them know beforehand would not harm anyone. I didn't, but should have.

> a call to the FAA letting them know beforehand would not harm anyone

I wouldn't be so sure. In fact, I would rather assume that the FAA would want to stop the launch before they can rest assured it's safe.

I've heard it goes rather smoothly, actually. Once you get someone on the phone that knows what you're talking about.

In the UK you issue a NOTAM, theres lots of information on http://ukhas.org.uk/guides:faq

Sould be mentioned that regulations apply to small drones as well, not just balloons.

This project took 2 years for me to accomplish. I'm pretty excited to share the results. Thanks for looking!

Congratulations :) great project and awesome shots.

Thanks! It was a ton of working getting here. I'm happy with how the images came out, but not totally happy. I know and see all of the (to me) glaring problems with them.

That was really fun reading how you solved some of these problems, especially the rotation correction of the horizon. Amazing that you were able to get a stable panorama out of a tumbling cube of cameras! I really look forward to seeing the video, wasn't able to view it (high traffic or bad browser).

I played with the Quake engine back in 2011 to experiment with how to use and configure a panorama in a game with Lua scripts. You can build your own camera cubes/prisms and use different lenses: http://shaunew.github.com/blinky/)

One of the results of my experiment is that the equirectangular projection is, well, fucking horrible for anything wider than 90 degrees. Lucid.it is a great tool, but no panorama tool should only allow the equirectangular projection. When you zoom out, you notice that the periphery becomes stretched, almost inducing nausea. There are better projections, namely the stereographic ones. You can see an example here of a 180 degree view of a panorama: http://www.ashnu.com/stereo.htm

I would like to get your panorama video working on a stereographic projection. That may require using a different tool or building one.

Also, did you explore the "philopod pitch variation" you mentioned in your first post for just using four cameras instead of six?

I've come across your Quake experiments before, I think. That or someone else has a page on modifying Quake to support stupid high FOV.

4 cameras wouldn't work very well with the cameras I used. It was a struggle with 6 cameras to find enough overlap get good quality stitching.

One thing that would be great is to get cameras that can be arranged in a tight enough configuration that they all share the same non-parallax point. Then, you don't have to do anything fancy to stitch them.

One piece I kind of glossed over is that at lower altitudes the ground is much closer to the camera than the sky. That means that you can't create a general case stitch profile as you're not working from the center of a sphere (in relation to the objects you're trying to use for control points), so as the payload rotates you have to stitch each frame individually. I may play at it some more and try to get a stitched video of the low altitudes of the descent. First, though, I'm going to take a break from the project for a bit.

Fantastic job on this, the results are great despite the challenges you faced. I'm inspired!

Hey, thanks! I'm eager to see what you make. :)

Some guys in Russia have done something similar. They have released a 360° aerial panorama [1] from the stratosphere. They have also been experimenting with 360° video [2] and provide detailed instructions on how they achieved their results.

[1] http://www.airpano.com/360Degree-VirtualTour.php?3D=Stratosp... [2] http://www.airpano.com/Articles-AirPano.php?article=101606

Wow, very cool. They used much nicer cameras than I did and get much nicer results. Not sure I believe the stars in the sky, though. ;)

Not sure how I didn't see this before. Thanks for the links!

hmm. Or did they? It looks like they were just pointing down and added the whole top in post.

I just LOVE seeing things like this. From the perspective of another tinker of panoramic things, what you have done is really impressive.

I've probably seen (or answered) some of your questions on the Hugin google group....

Anyway, 2 years? I wish you had come out sooner, I or someone else out there would have been happy to help you speed things up a bit. I know the satisfaction of having done it all yourself though, of course!

And yes, I have been dreaming about doing the same thing for a few years.... so, my hat goes off to you for executing this really nicely.

cheers!

Thanks! I was actually surprised at how hard it was to find people interested in helping me. I sure could have used it.

And I haven't been totally silent on it. I have been posting regular updates on my G+ page pretty much all along.

What happened to your website links? Could you email them? I've been busy and only remember you had some.

Hi,

Sorry I deleted my links, I was one of the first comments and just wanted to compliment you without appearing like publicizing myself. I'm founder of 360cities.net, panomonkey.com and sphericam.com. I wish you had contacted me before, even if you wanted to fly solo on your project I would have been happy to at least point you in the right direction on some stuff. :) Please do contact me at 360cities on the g mail domain or skype jeffrey.s.martin, would love to hear more!

cheers!

Wow! Seriously congrats! I expected it to be just another weather balloon launch but by correcting the rotation issues you made the project not only more challenging but more enjoyable to read and view! (I also love your blog)

Will you be doing more future projects like this?

Oh man, you just reminded me that there's one (in particular) other interesting image I forgot to share in that post.

Here, check this out: http://robotrising.org/StratoSphere/?src=images/cam1-200fram...

That is what one camera saw over the course of 200 frames, or ~7 seconds. It's not as nicely aligned as the other images because this one is taken from many points in time and space, but it's still pretty neat. I'll be sure to get this added to the blog post at some point. Thanks for the reminder.

And thanks for reading the blog! That is the longest thing I've written in a long time, and it took a lot of time to prepare that post. I do appreciate it.

I'd love to do more projects. I have nothing planned at the moment, but who knows what might come along.

The next logical step is to write a viewer for these videos that works with the Oculus Rift headset! You wouldn't be able to use stereo 3D, but even in 2D the head tracking abilities of the headset would make for a very interesting playback experience nonetheless.

Awesome.

Great that you have sound! Reminds me of that mind-bending NASA booster rocket video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aCOyOvOw5c

Some friends and I took video and imagery with a globe (at low altitude) this past saturday. We have thousands of images. I spent a day writing an autostitcher that uses Surf, and some affine transforms to merge it correctly. Then I experimented with orthorectifying with elevation data and tie points referenced to Bing and Google satellite. I then used a tiling server to cut it and overlay it to Google Maps. I have not written a blog post about it yet, but was happy to find this to encourage meto write it soon :) Thank you!

Please do, I'd love to read it and see the results.

I, too, have thousands of images. The camera did ice up a bit on the way up and fog up a bit on the way down, but there is still some great imagery in there.

I always wondered if it would be possible to launch a small satelite from a balloon.

With a rocket too, possibly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockoon

This was exactly what i had in mind. Thanks :)

The real energy cost with obtaining orbit is the high transverse velocity, not the height. You need to reach velocity whereby the net motion ("falling") vector is towards the horizon. Gravity is only marginally less at higher altitudes even up to 100K feet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_of_Earth#Altitude

What about helium? Last time I checked, helium was getting way more expensive than before, and it was actually kind of hard to find.

Hydrogen is a great substitute - it's abundant, cheap, provides a bit more lift and if you're aware of the risks and handle it properly it's quite safe.

I wish more people would do stuff like this, and long-duration autonomous sea vehicles, buoys, etc.

So when are you starting your manned space program?

*Mars mission.

Server overloaded :(

Yeah! :(

Sorry. My job isn't even close to maintaining high visitor count websites. Sorry about that.

I think I made it better.

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