Maybe you've seen polar panoramas, those super wide angle photographs that turn everyday scenes into funky, tiny planets. Jonas Ginter, a German journalist and photographer, has spent the last two years trying to figure out how to achieve the same effect with video. He finally cracked it, and it's awesome.
Ginter says he's been kicking around the idea of 360-degree video for over two years. First he tried strapping his camera to a turntable and snapping thousands of photographs. Then he experimented with all sorts of mirror-aided optical trickery. Eventually, he realized the only way to truly get 360-degree video was by capturing the image in one take. That meant multiple cameras. Six, in fact.
The final setup uses half a dozen GoPro cameras, all latched into a cute little image-capturing cube with the help of a special 3-D printed holder. The camera array's overlapping images cover 360 degrees horizontally and 180 vertically, which Ginter then stitches into the clips you see above.
It's a wild update to the old school fish-eye effect. Someone tell Busta Rhymes it's time for his big comeback video.
