360 Degree Camera

Published by Sierra Monica B., on July 7th, 2008 4:14 pm, in the categories: Gadgets

Olympus has announced the development of its 360 degree camera lens built by the specialists at the Future Creation Laboratory. The lens is 3 cm in diameter and can capture at 360 degrees on horizontal and 180 degrees on vertical. It will be the best security camera solution of the market supporting directional microphone.
The 360 degree cameras, also known as rotating panoramic cameras, can capture the full spectrum because the entire camera is rotating and not just the lens, such as in the the case of short-rotation models.

There is a mechanism designed to rotate it continuously while the speed of the film pulled through it matches the speed of the image moving across the image plane.
Wikipedia explains that the exposure is made via a narrow slit, and that images are produced using a linear sensor with 10,000 elements, the full panorama having 120,000 individual line images. The resulting image will have 1,200 MP.

There are digital 360 degree cameras and non-digital models able to capture the full 360 spectrum.
One example of a 360-capable camera that is also very popular, is the 0-360 Panoramic Optic featuring 115 degrees vertical field of view, built-in bubble level, full-glass optics, hard shell protective carrying case, viewer with pull-down menu and text descriptions, full-aluminum hardware, and precision reflector with front aluminum optical coating and quartz protective coating.
0-360 comes with lifetime warranty and has a starting price of $595.

360 degree chips from ChipWrights, used by Sony in its 360 Degree Camera, features a CCD sensor of 380K pixels and 30 frames per second video recording, with full-circle lens. The image from 70 degrees above the plane of the lens and 17 degrees below it is reflected twice on 2 reflective surfaces so the image forms in a ring on the CCD sensor. As it results in a depth of field from 0 to infinity, the focus is not required.

The panorama expansion can be processed either in hardware, using dedicated expansion unit to output expanded panorama images as a simple composite video signal without a computer, or in software, where the ring-shaped image converts first to the panorama image and then to output. With the help of a software you can pan, tilt and zoom.

(Source: Gadget Reviews; Wikipedia)