Open-source panoramic video with the Bloggie

Craft & Design Photography & Video
Open-source panoramic video with the Bloggie
BloggieUnwarper.jpg

Golan Levin recently picked up a Bloggie video camera, which is a pretty standard camera except for a neat panoramic lens attachment that you can get for it. Unfortunately, it didn’t include Mac-compatible software to convert the donut-shaped video into a wide panorama, so he wrote an Open-Source Panoramic Video tool to do the conversion. The result, a reasonable quality panoramic video, are pretty impressive for such a cheap system! Additionally, the conversion software and camera are both capable of working in real time, which means that it should be possible to capture real-time panoramic video.

After playing around with it a bit, he also noticed that the camera resolution in panoramic mode was limited to 720p. To get around this, he modded the panoramic lens, removing a magnet that notified the camera to reduce it’s resolution. This allowed him to capture 1080p video, however because of the way the camera sensor works, it turns out that the top and bottom of the panoramic donut are cut of. If one can live with that, however, it almost doubles the resolution of the panoramic video.

3 thoughts on “Open-source panoramic video with the Bloggie

  1. Travis Deyle says:

    If you think the simple unwrapping is cool, you should look at the more general class of “computational cameras”:

    http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/06/26/computational-cameras-exploiting-megapixels-and-computers-redefine-modern-camera

    You can do some amazing things with mirrors & lenses.

    1. Matt Mets says:

      Yeah! Computational photography continues to blow my mind, and the hizook roundup is tops. I liked Golan’s project because it is simple, has a clear goal, and successfully achieves it.

  2. giri says:

    Hi all,
    I have extracted the original Sony 360° Unwrap tool from PlayMemories (Thats the shitty software Sony wants everyone with a Sony cam to install). I think this might be useful fore some of you, because there is hardly any free ‘360° Doughnut unwrap Software’ out there… However This tool can only open 1280×720 .mp4 files. You can download the installer here: http://www29.zippyshare.com/v/V7Jp4z2A/file.html
    (If the link is dead, you can always contact me at http://nwrk.biz)

Comments are closed.

Discuss this article with the rest of the community on our Discord server!
Tagged

ADVERTISEMENT

Maker Faire Bay Area 2023 - Mare Island, CA

Escape to an island of imagination + innovation as Maker Faire Bay Area returns for its 15th iteration!

Buy Tickets today! SAVE 15% and lock-in your preferred date(s).

FEEDBACK