FollowTaking pictures is about to get a lot more fun if computer engineer Jonas Pfeil and his colleagues have anything to say about it. A recent graduate from the Technical University of Berlin, Pfeil and his team designed and built a working prototype “ball” camera- a foam-studded sphere (about 8 inches in diameter) peppered with 36 tiny 2-megapixel cell phone cameras. Throw it in the air and it captures an image at the top of the ball’s trajectory. Talk about redefining photography- one day, snapping pics may give way to “tossing” them.
Panoramic images, with their large width to height ratio, are appealing because they better approximate the way we humans view the world. But capturing them typically requires a tripod, several camera positions and lots of stitching together. Pfeil’s invention eliminates all that since the component images are captured simultaneously. That’s especially handy since it also freezes moving objects that might otherwise blur or shift during the image-gathering process.
