Throwable 36-Camera Ball Nearly Ready To Toss

An anonymous reader writes "About 2 years ago, Jonas Pfeil, created a Throwable Panorama Ball: A rugged, grapefruit-sized ball with 36 fixed-focus, 2-megapixel digital camera sensors that capture simultaneously when thrown in the air, creating a full spherical panorama of the surrounding scene. Now, an Indiegogo campaign aims to produce the the camera (Now known as Panono) available for about $500. The quality of the sample images is impressive: the resolution is quite good and most importantly, the stitching artifacts are hardly visible."

Throwing is one thing

[rossdee]

Will it survive more than 1 hard landing
Expensive for a 1 shot device

DROP IT! DROP IT NOW! {Bang!} {Bang!}

[CanEHdian]

Two guys, one with a large backpack, are in the middle of an always very busy Time Square, NYC, NY. They look around, excitedly talking to each other. They stop, the back pack goes off and a big, rugged, grapefruit-sized ball is taken out. They are seen fumbling with it, like they are using some kind of activation mechanism. Then one of them is what looks like preparing to throw said ball in the air. The police officer, who had been observing the whole thing, takes immediate action!

Re:Good Luck

[vadim_t]

Better hope Indiegogo likes your project or it will get buried and rendered invisible by about day three.

You have to get it noticed by other websites of course. Like Slashdot, for instance.

Crowdfunding sites do absolutely nothing to help indie projects get off the ground. They collect their cut while they make rude gestures, and that's it.

Crowdfunding sites are about the only reason why I pay those projects in the first place. If it's not on kickstarter or on indiegogo, your chances of getting my money are very close to 0.

Frankly, I can't understand why anyone uses those sites. They're going to do all the work themselves. Why not keep all the money?

For the project starter, it offers a way to host the information, communicate with contributors, and receive money. All those things take time to do on your own, and the people doing the project would rather spend time on it, and not on setting up Apache, web sites, and working out how to deal with card payments.

For the contributor, it offers a filter that rejects the obvious crap. Also provides an intermediary that helps me waste less of my money. If a random project needs $100K to be viable and I donate through paypal, if they only make $10K, I can't really expect to get my money back. On kickstarter, that is assured.

On the project's own site, they control the interaction. They can ignore annoying questions and pretend everything is going great. On sites like kickstarter and indiegogo they can't do that, and it works as a great indicator to potential contributors about whether there's anything fishy about the project.

And I also don't believe for one fucking second that a bunch of clowns can put up a web page and raise $250,000 for a board game in four weeks. The fragrance coming off that shit makes my scam alarm strip naked and run into traffic.

And that's precisely why kickstarter and indiegogo are so awesome. You see what the project wants upfront. You lose no money if the required amount is not reached. People digging into the details of the project can post about it, and you can read their warnings.

There is still considerable risk of course, but so far I've not seen anything better than this. It's certainly loads better than to just send money through paypal to some random person.

Great idea, but for one small problem

[wonkey_monkey]

You'll always have some yutz in the middle of your photo staring up at the camera with his hands in the air.