Collaborated with Ricoh to produce the Ricoh Theta, the world's first consumer one shot pano camera that fits in your pocket and that is controlled by your phone.
Prototype multi-lens camera could capture panoramic spheres, walks and close ups.
The prototype consisted of a phone app and an independent lens unit.
Multiple panoramas can be connected together using hot spot jumps or simple walk transitions.
Unity’s game engine made it possible to build the 3D environments needed to connect panoramas together and allowed the prototype to run on different devices.
One Shot Pano Camera
Set out to reinvent the process of photography for ordinary people and build the scaffolding for augmented reality. Novel approaches married custom hardware and software with computer vision algorithms to create immersive photographic experiences.
Augmented reality scaffolding
With a view to the future of search and augmented reality, in 2010, Microsoft sought to create new ways of capturing images in order to create the scaffolding needed to overlay digital information on the real world. New camera technologies were explored to make it faster, cheaper and easier to capture the world photographically.
Built our own hardware
After careful analysis of existing panoramic cameras and software systems, developed the strategic opportunities and requirements for a new one-shot pano camera. Conceptually the prototype deconstructed the camera into two parts: the lens and the viewfinder. This new lens was a set of multiple fish-eye lenses aligned to capture a spherical panoramic scene instantaneously with a single click. Stitching software inside the lens seamlessly merged all the images into a single panorama. The view finder and a shutter release button to trigger the capture was built as a phone app. This resulted in a system that was hundreds of times faster and simpler than any existing panoramic capture technique.
UX for panoramic tour capture
The prototype was able to capture panoramas, walks and close ups independently. Images could then be connected together into immersive photographic tour experiences inside the phone app. This new phone app experience was sketched and prototyped in Unity 3D. Working closely with hardware and firmware engineers, defined specs for the camera along with communication protocols between camera and phone. The lens hardware and phone app software development were developed independently before being merged into the working system. This advanced development work helped inform collaboration with Ricoh, who took these ideas to production and delivered the world's first consumer panoramic camera small enough to fit in a pocket.