Space. The final 360-degree frontier. These are the voyages of the Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS), whose ongoing mission is to seek out new civilizations and launch rockets at them. For their latest adventure, they stuck a 360-degree video camera into their rocket. The resulting video is spectacular, from the pre-launch drama of an attack by a giant bee to the parachute release. It also works in Google Cardboard or Oculus Rift through the YouTube viewer.
The 360-degree video was made from video captured by five GoPro cameras stuck inside a custom-built module mounted inside the rocket body, then stitched together by PTGUI for the final video. The PSAS has been building modular rockets for some time, and this camera was mounted on their LV2 model. In this flight, the rocket reached an altitude of 4.7km (about 3 miles high), reaching a peak velocity of about 350 meters per second. That’s a pretty impressive height and speed, and you definitely get a good feeling for the dramatic climb of the rocket as it zooms up. This is some impressive stuff from a group of serious rocketeers who are boldly going where nobody has gone before…
360 degree view only describes two dimensions.
If it is the first then you don’t need the ‘?’. If you aren’t sure then perhaps don’t write it in the title!
I think the question mark is related to not being sure if this is the first time someone’s taken 360-degree video from an amateur rocket or not.
+1. I’m not sure where he got the idea, but I didn’t misread the title as it is.
I was making two separate points
1) saying a ‘360 degree view’ is meaningless, you could have a 360 degree view that was 0.0001 degrees ‘tall’. that would be rubbish!!!
2) if you aren’t sure if its the first 360-degree camera rocket then don’t write it in the title at least! it smacks of the cheesy clickbait spam littering ‘news’ sites now.
Ahhh Portland in the 90s and 00s; between snagging a few rotations at the Reed reactor and the PSU rocketry club it made me feel like I was getting some really rare mad scientist boyscout badges. I played a bit with guidance, it was my only opportunity to work with rockets big enough to require a vacuum chamber when casting the motors. We got old used up carbon electrodes from (Reynolds?) and lathed them into the exhaust nozzles. good times…
Next version, auto rotation removal?
Click and drag the video if you’re on a PC. You can null out the rotation by panning slightly in the opposite direction.
Wear a VR headset. Sit on a computer chair. Spin the chair opposite the rotation. Be sure to have a bucket near by.
Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS) had displays one of their rockets at Portland Mini Maker faire last year. I was very interested in their telemetry system using Wifi. They shown one of their rocket launch videos using VR googles. I could only watch half of the video because the rotation started to make me dizzy.
What camera did you use?