The Go Pro max is a omni vision camera.
For more, see the
Structure from Motion project from 2007
and the our Omnivis project from 2009
or some Slides from July 2007
from a talk at Colby. The math of 360 photography is pretty cool. What is nice about the Go Pro Max is that
it gives the photographer tools to navigate the camera parameters. The math is pretty simple: Place the
picture on a sphere, place a camera inside the sphere and give a sector to record. Now, you can move around
inside the sphere and simultaneously also change the camera angle. This allows for pretty cool shots:
Here were some examples recorded at the end of last week:
New: July 25: Life in a Day footage:
Here are some screen shots of these movies just illustrating how one can change the point of view
without changing the camera! For more background see
this paper on a structure from motion inequality.
(We had submitted that paper in 2007 once to a journal to get the answer that while this is a nice
result it should be suitable for a textbook on computer vision, but not for a journal. We did not
try again but such unwelcoming reactions from a community made me personally run away from the
subject as fast as I could. I then turned then (as a mathematical rather nomadic person) to graph theory).
That paper with Jose is is quite fundamental: it defines a camera as a map Q
from a d-manifold N to itself with the property that Q(N) is a lower dimensional surface and
that Q2 = Q. The later property is borrowed from projections in linear algebra. The point
is however (and that happens in particular in 360 degree computer vision) that the map is non-linear.
The image of Q is the retina of the camera. In the case of the Go Pro max,
the camera first projects three dimensional space orthogonally onto a sphere S=Q(N). This produces a
picture on a sphere S. Now, you can place and orient yourself inside the sphere and record part of the
retina. This is a second camera operation. In some sense, the camera has rebuild a 3D environment of
the surrounding and then allows you to fly around in side that space.
It is very simple but effective. Here are some shots from the two videos.
(Click for a large 4000 pixel picture):
