Have you ever taken a second to consider just how many miles of road there are in the United States?
It’s 4.09 million miles — about 2.65 million paved and 1.42 million dirt or gravel.
Now think about Google Maps Street View.
Google has a fleet of cars to photograph a 360-degree image of every inch of those roads…
252 billion inches, to be sure.
Google’s Street View is one of the most famous 360-degree photography projects, and the company employs a fleet of cars, bikes, and backpacks mounted with panoramic camera arrays to do the job.
As virtual reality slowly eases into the mainstream, 360-degree cameras that can capture immersive images and video are going to become more of a necessary piece of equipment.
Recently, VR has been used in a lot of creative ways, such as video gaming and cinema. Media company RYOT, for example, used it to great dramatic effect in its documentary about the 7.8-magnitude earthquake in Nepal last April. Viewers put on their VR headsets and could stand in the post-earthquake rubble as Susan Sarandon narrated the surroundings.
We are in something of a boom time for these camera rigs, and there are already a host of new companies throwing their hats into the ring.
GoPro (NASDAQ: GPRO)
During Google’s annual developer conference, GoPro announced it was working on a 360-degree camera array to capture spherical, three-dimensional imagery for use in virtual reality. The array GoPro revealed at the conference chained 16 GoPro cameras together on the newly announced Google Jump platform.
Jump assembles these 16 separate videos into a single super-high-resolution 3D360 video. In the near future, these videos will be viewable on any smartphone via a simple cardboard viewing case that turns the phone into a VR headset.
The advantage here is that GoPro is already a trusted name in wide-angle cameras, and it has the hardware manufacturing already in place. This unit has the power to multiply the sales of existent GoPro hardware.
360Heros
An independent but related party to GoPro is New York start-up 360Heros. The company produces and sells plug-and-play solutions for connecting multiple GoPro cameras into a single 360-degree package.
Its systems are built out of airplane-grade nylon and have already been used to shoot the first 360-degree video on the top of Mount Everest. The company’s team also includes divers, and the product line has expanded to include a 360-degree mount suitable for use underwater.
Jaunt VR
Palo Alto-based start-up Jaunt VR has been working for two years on its own panoramic 3D camera for virtual reality. The first production unit will be called “Neo” and will ship to its partners in August 2015. Production will scale up, and commercialization will begin later in the year.
Rather than basing itself on Google’s platform, Jaunt has its own proprietary algorithm for image stitching and 3D audio capture.
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Bounce Imaging
360-degree imagery isn’t just for entertainment. As Google Maps Street View has shown us, there are plenty of practical applications. Boston start-up Bounce Imaging has developed a “throwable” 360-degree camera for law enforcement and first responders.
First conceived in the wake of the Haiti earthquake in 2010, Bounce Imaging co-founder Francisco Aguilar imagined different types of throwable sensors for emergency scenarios. The idea is that police, soldiers, or search and rescue teams can throw the device into an unsafe area for quick situational assessment. It takes pictures and sends them wirelessly to an Android or iOS smartphone or tablet.
Instead of using lots of individual cameras, the company’s Explorer model uses a single six-lens camera that has a 240-Watt LED flash and a 60-foot wireless transmission range. The tactical model is priced well outside of consumer price range at $2,495 per unit.
Panono
Raising over $1.2 million on Indiegogo last year, the Panono panoramic ball camera uses 36 commodity cameras (3 megapixel) and stitches them together for a full 360-degree image. The German company behind the device, Panono GmbH, was founded by an extremely young team of entrepreneurs.
Panono doesn’t have a specific usage case in its outline, and the company lists all sorts of potential applications, from personal to journalism to marketing and public relations to real estate and tourism.
Giroptic
French company Giroptic makes its own 360-degree camera — appropriately called the 360cam — that uses just three super-wide-angle lenses and includes GPS location tracking and gyroscopic image stabilization. This product has a secondary feature that is truly novel: home security.
The 360cam can be outfitted with a base that screws into standard 220/110-volt light sockets. This connection gives the camera both a perfect home and a solution for power that doesn’t require outlets and power cables. It’s like the Nestcam, but with an extremely convenient solution for placement and power.
The world of 360-degree imagery is still developing, but it is sure to be one of the most hotly competitive areas as virtual reality matures. Since these devices are also uniquely suited for use with unmanned drones, there are multiple avenues in which they can eventually take hold.
Good Investing,
Tim Conneally
For the last seven years, Tim Conneally has covered the world of mobile and wireless technology, enterprise software, network hardware, and next generation consumer technology. Tim has previously written for long-running software news outlet Betanews and for financial media powerhouse Forbes.
