360 Video Project: Camera Setup

This year, for my crazy holiday project, I wanted to shoot 360 videos. A common way to do this is via image stitching. The basic idea is setting up multiple cameras, at different angles, and stitching all the images into one big image. Now this is costly, as it requires many cameras. There are also commercial products like the like Giroptic’s 360cam, bulb cam, Ricoh Theta; but they are all quite expensive.

Having seen Mike Szczys semi-mirrored light bulb 360-degree camera project on the hackaday site. I was curious to try it out. With this approach, only one camera is required, no stitching is needed and only basic trigonometry is required to unwarp the image.

My setup slightly differs, but the basic idea remains the same. To simplify the project, I mounted the bulb onto a lamp instead of building a custom mount. The downside is that parts of the lamp will be visible in the final image.

To make my setup "portable", I've attached a bar clamp to a tripod to hold a clamp-based desk lamp. The lamp holds the semi-mirrored bulb and the camera faces up aiming directly into the center of the bulb. This is what a picture from the camera looks like

And this is what the setup looks like.

This concludes my first post of my 360 video camera project, but I know you really want to know what the 360 image looks like after it's unwarped. So I will give you a sneak peek at the result, and my next post will cover the image processing part of the project.