How much would you pay for a 360 degree camera? How about $15 if you already have a Raspberry Pi and a Pi camera hanging around? If you don’t, you’ll have to add that minimal cost into the build. [Gigafide] noticed how a spherical mirror, made to see around corners, showed an all-around view if you took a picture of it from below. He snagged a panoramic lens made for an iPhone and stripped it for its optics. Some custom software and a little work resulted in a usable 360 degree camera.
SimpleCV (a light version of OpenCV) provides the algorithms to unwrap the frames and you can take video with the setup (see the video below). Mounting the optics took some 3D printing and the Pi operates as a hot spot to send the video out.
If you just play the video below, you won’t be too impressed. You need to pause the video and then use the controls at the top left of the screen to move your view in any direction. Granted, the quality isn’t great, but what do you want for $15?
If you want to see a nice 360 degree video from a drone, we’ve looked at this one. Very nice, but probably a lot more than $15. Or you can try a rocket.
Roomba’s docking station has a similar conical mirror for its IR sensor. I’ve been looking for a way to cheaply obtain such a mirror for some time already.
This hack used a christmas ornament to do the same:
http://hackaday.com/2011/06/16/360-degree-photography-uses-very-easy-post-processing/
I’m sure I read this before, but thanks for the link!
a new ball from a ball bearing is perfectly round and shiny. The weight might be a problem perhaps.
Sweep the camping/hiking section of a large chain store, some of the tent lights and ‘fake lanterns’ use a very uniform conical or spherical reflector. :)
The LED and solar light section of Lowes and Home Depot have some very high quality reflectors as well but obviously more expensive.
The video is really just 4 seconds of almost still image?
You can drag the video with your cursor, Its a 360 degree video and youtube has support for that kind of video.
Oh yes, thank you.
If you open it in the Android YouTube app you can rotate the phone to pan around the scene
If you’re going to replicate this, I’d suggest using my fork of the dewarp code from a few years back when I did this myself, I significantly optimised the dewarping build step.
https://github.com/pelrun/dewarp
Whoops, also forgot the alternative code and 3d printer mounts I did here: https://github.com/pelrun/kogetoPi