BERLIN, GERMANY - Going way beyond the typical panoramic picture that requires patching together a series of single shots or using a distortion-creating wide angle lens, the new Panono throwable panoramic ball camera takes previously impossible images that are 360° X 360° and 72 megapixel full-spherical images that capture everything in every direction.
With its playful ball-shape that begs to be thrown into the air and an unprecedented 36 cameras that fire simultaneously, the Panono ball camera captures moments in time in their entirety that can be viewed in the Panono app by moving the mobile device up, down and all around as if inside the full-spherical image.
Today, Panono is launching a crowd-funding campaign on Indiegogo.com (http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/panono-panoramic-ball-camera) to offer anyone who loves taking and sharing pictures the chance to support Panono and to order one of the first Panono throwable panoramic ball cameras at a special price.
“We’re creating an entirely new panoramic-photography experience, one that can finally include people and is social,” said Jonas Pfeil, president and co-founder of Panono and creator of the camera. “Until now, it’s been impossible to take good panoramic shots with people in them because people move in between shots and cause ghosting. Since all of Panono’s 36 cameras fire at once in every direction, it captures an instant in time that includes everyone.even the photographer.in a blur-free panoramic image. With the Panono, taking panoramic pictures becomes an all-inclusive, fun new social experience and a way literally to capture all the details of that moment.”
The Panono has an accelerometer in it, which when the ball camera is tossed in the air measures the launch acceleration to calculate when the ball will reach its apex. At that point, when Panono is at its highest point and barely moving before it starts to descend, all of the 36 fixed-focus cameras fire at the same time to take a 72 megapixel, high-resolution full-spherical image. A complete, 360° X 360° memory is captured.
Panono’s images download wirelessly to a free Panono mobile app and can be viewed on a smartphone or tablet by pointing the device in whatever direction the viewer wants to look. The person can also pinch or spread the image to explore more detail and find things the photographer might not even have noticed when taking the shot. People are invited to try out this new viewing experience and see sample 360° X 360° panoramic shots by downloading the free Panono app (iOS6+) in the App Store and Android Marketplace. Panono images can also be viewed in a web browser much like Google Street View.
Approximately the size and shape of a small grapefruit and weighing 0.66 lbs/300 grams, the Panono naturally invites people to toss it into the air for snapping photos--but it also operates as a hand-held camera or on a pole. The exterior casing is made out of a tough clear plastic that reveals the 36 cameras inside. The camera battery recharges through a USB port.
The development of the Panono camera began as part of Jonas Pfeil’s master’s thesis in computer engineering at the Technical University of Berlin. In 2011, he presented a prototype of the ball camera at the prestigious SIGGRAPH ASIA technical conference. His concept received tremendous acclaim, and his demo video received more than three million views on YouTube. Encouraged by the reception to his idea, he co-founded Panono with classmates Bjorn Bollensdorff and Qian Qin to refine the throwable panoramic ball camera and bring it to market.
Ralf Coenen, former COO and member of the board of famed Leica Camera and former head of the camera lens division at Carl Zeiss, who is working with Panono said, “Panono actually deserves the description as revolutionary: It is something entirely new that literally adds a new dimension--360° X 360°--to photographic images and will let us save our memories like never before, not to mention have fun capturing them.”
