Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera
This is still only a prototype, and therefore need some more work, but I find the idea to be quite brilliant.
Created by Jonas Pfeil, the ball contains 36 2 megapixel cameras that are triggered at the balls highest point when thrown into the air by an accelerometer.
This results in a 360 degree panoramic image that you can navigate around via a panoramic viewer software that comes with the ball.
They also have a video on YouTube which you can see here.
To be presented as the Emerging Technologies demonstration ‘Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera’ at the SIGGRAPH Asia 2011: Jonas Pfeil, Kristian Hildebrand, Carsten Gremzow, Bernd Bickel, Marc Alexa. Computer Graphics Group, TU Berlin.
Diploma thesis ‘Throwable Camera Array for Capturing Spherical Panoramas’: Jonas Pfeil. 2010. Advisors: Marc Alexa, Carsten Gremzow.
Images are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.