15 karma · joined September 16, 2024
Domestically (not on exported cameras that are restricted to 9FPS), you can actually hit ~27FPS reasonably easily and with our built-in IMU this is in fact usable in flight. However, thermal is hard enough to interpret when stationary so the main use case for the THERMAL variant is once it is in the middle of a room or on a pole to search attics etc. However our visual cameras are super easy to work with in flight - if you download our app (Bounce Viewer) and go to the demo videos in History you can see it working on the back of a dog or thrown in the air.
And I mean thousands of these systems are in use around the world (of the visual, the thermal Pit Viper we just announced) and have been thrown through windows, down stairs, on ropes, poles, vehicles, dogs....
As noted, indeed our near-IR cameras (prior generations - the Recce360 Mini etc) are much easier to interpret in-flight than thermal just because it is hard to get your head around panoramic thermal as easily. If you want to see fully 360 video of that, just download our app (Bounce Viewer) and in the History section scroll down to demo videos and you can pan around as it is thrown in the air or shooting around on the back of a dog. Note that the stabilization is along multiple axes!
Indeed Jonas' setup was pretty cool but this had actually been tried many times before THAT- including cool designs by the Brits, US Navy, and others from decades ago and a cool conceptual design by Franziska Faro (spelling, sorry!). ALL however suffered from the challenge of doing real-time processing with low-latency and automatic stabilization in flight without melting the camera through too much processing. The way we cracked it, first for our visual cameras and now for thermal, is through a stitching method that is 200X-2000X more efficient and noise-insensitive because it is not based on SURF/SIFT feature detection (if you're into the nerdy side of things).