Kurtis Keller and Leandra Vicci at UNC designed the camera together with Sam Drake and Russ Fish at the University of Utah. The parts were created using Utah's advanced manufacturing techniques and the Alpha1 modeller from Utah. The first prototype was sent to UNC and Matt Cutts wrote software to handle the video streams from the cameras. Science and Technology Center are Cornell University, Brown University, and the California Institute of Technology. The camera cluster seeks to add to the functionality of devices like the Omnicam .
Similar products are available commercially from Be Here and several other companies.
These systems provide a wide field of view but only use a single camera. Single-camera solutions lack enough spatial resolution to see much detail in parts of the image. A multi-camera approach has more images to use so that resolution is uniformly high. Our initial prototype used two cameras to capture a wider field of field of view. Click on the thumbnail to see a larger picture.