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It's a camera you throw in the air and it takes a panoramic picture of the surrounding area.

The actual Indiegogo site: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/panono-panoramic-ball-came...

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I don't think it's 3D, it's just a panoramic image you can scroll around.

Fixed; it would be cool if it took several shoots instead. Or even better, put cameras in there instead and throw the ball around while recording.

Why not 3D, in fact, if it had accelerometers and gyroscopes? Just throw it at around 45 degrees of elevation, capture photos during flight at a few fps, and post-process the results for a 3D scene reconstruction. (You'd have to design it much more durable for that mode of operation, of course.)

This is a nice idea -- the biggest practical problem would be motion blur while the cameras are in flight. If thrown straight up, there's a moment of zero motion at the top that mitigates that problem, but it's still an issue the rest of the time -- fast shutter speed helps but rolling shutter complicates it. Note that you could still get plenty of parallax for 3D from throwing straight up, just not right above and below the camera path, so that minimizes the durability problem from landing on the ground. It also provides a nice prior estimate (and additional constraints) on camera poses for structure from motion as the ball has to obey gravity.

Edit: On the indiegogo page they specify throwing is mostly for outdoor use: "While throwing works great outdoors during daylight, you can also use the camera indoors or in the dark when mounted on a stick or handheld." This would be due to the motion-blur/shutter-speed/sufficient-light problem.

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