by David Zax, Technology Review
Panoramic images–typically stitched together by software, based on multiple exposures from a single camera–have grown quite popular in the age of the digital camera. Sites featuring 360-degree images abound online, and some even feature interactive panoramas in which you can pan up, down, and around. There’s something inherent in the idea of a panorama–the sweeping, comprehensive view–that impels the photographer to seek higher ground: even Eadweard Muybridge’s iconic 1878 panorama of San Francisco was taken from the top of Nob Hill. You can almost draw a line from Muybridge’s yearning to a new device created by Jonas Pfeil, a computer engineer who studied at the Technical University of Berlin. Pfeil’s concept is remarkable: instead of manually twirling your single camera around and then stitching the pieces together, his “Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera” has 36 cameras embedded in it for simultaneous exposure.
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/helloworld/27272/?p1=blogs
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