Sphericam

I was building 360º video cameras in some form since around 2008. In the beginning I chose the simplest, cheapest, most accessible off-the-shelf components I could find, which happened to be analog CCTV board cameras and various types of DVR capture cards. This yielded surprisingly decent quality at the time; additionally the relatively large pixel size, as well as the very mature and highly evolved analog CMOS sensor, allowed extremely high sensitivity in darkness.

Here we have 4 VGA-resolution analog CMOS board cameras, each with a fisheye lens; these board cameras are mounted to a custom CNC-machined aluminum core, mounted inside a common fuse box. The cameras are connected to a 4-channel security DVR card (PCI-express) which is connected to a regular x86 windows PC.

Of course, when the opportunity presents itself, a good old ammo box should be used to mount the PC inside. The ammo box and camera head are mounted to a standard US army "molle" backpack frame. Fun fact: this is the same backpack frame used by the original Ghostbusters.

Hacking around with analog video components eventually evolved into the device that became Sphericam 1, which was launched on Kickstarter in 2012. This Kickstarter campaign earned around $35,000 USD, from around 50 backers, who eventually received their working Sphericam 1 cameras a few months later (we were late in shipping them, but we did ship them all). Catch up on what I'm doing now.