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Wasn't this invented by Disney in the 50s? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle-Vision_360%C2%B0

I was just thinking about how the idea has been around a long time. Even back in the early 2000s I was working on a project that used a camera on a special tripod that would let you take pictures in 360 degrees and stitch them together with some software in post (quicktime I think?).

But I think the neat thing is using readily-available GoPro cameras and stitching the video together quickly. That takes a lot of processing power to do on the fly.

QuickTimeVR Toolkit. It was painfully slow on my Quadra and the stitching usually had to manually corrected by nudging the images around (didn't help that this was pre-digital cameras and errors in slide registration and scanning compounded) but I thought it was close to magic - even if it was running in MPW ;-)

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