360 degree video real time... interested?

I made a gizmo out of a WalMart plastic lazy suzan with a mirror mounted on it at a 45 deg angle. Had a webcam looking straight up at the angled mirror through a hole in the middle of the lazy susan. Worked pretty good except that the image did a barrel roll as it was rotated. But good fun for an internet web cam. I've seen other optics that had a cam look straight up at a properly shaped mirror surface for a 360 deg view, but the view was also like doing a loop on a roller coaster.

I'll give it a shot.

From:z snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com

Please be assured; I am not offended by any of the great ideas I have gotten here. I do appreciate this exorcise in overcoming all obsticals everyone might imagine. I am aware it is not unique, but it is super competive and my own working design. BTW; I came to my solution prior to seeing any of the sights or products mentioned and I am cheaper by far. I can sell at prices below 100 dollars when Others I see are 500-900 just for the mirror, let alone their softwae. Search for that! Z!

I admire the innovation many have expressed.

I hate to be a wet blanket, but a very similar product already is in the Homeland Security market. I read a new product release about 3 weeks ago in several of the government publications.

However, research what's out there and see if you can do it better.

Re patents, research Don Lancaster's online articles on the matter. It's unlikely you can afford a patent to start with, and by filing you release all details into the public domain.

Start here. First hit on Google:

They won't. They'll spend the money instead to break your patent, and there are very few which can't be broken by someone determined to do so.

There now is an annual fee for keeping a patent alive, which costs you whether you do anything with it or not.

Stats show perhaps 1% of items or ideas patented actually are brought to market.

And someone else working on the same idea simply can build the thing offshore where you can't touch them.

Figure it will run not less than $50K and likely a good bit more, using a mandatory attorney, to file and obtain a patent. From start to finish will be several years.

You're better off keeping the details quiet, not patenting, and getting in and out of the market and make your money quickly.

My father has 25 electronic patents in the defense industry. As a kid he and I did patent searches together, he taught me to write disclosures and all the ins and outs. It's gotten worse, not better. I never bothered to patent any of our company's products. We simply marketed them as soon as possible, got in and captured the early sales, and built a reputation and deep niche in the technology while other companies were taking their time getting to market. My company was manufacturing commercial and government wireless video before anyone else had heard of it for surveillance. We still sell it, even with all the competition, and never patented any of it.

Keep working and innovating, but maybe team up with a business manager. Engineers don't run companies very well.

Your project sounds interesting. I hope you are able to do something with it, or a child of it. Nice to see someone actually using their brain on innovation and finding solutions to problems.

Steve

Don't you just love the legal system? The government says: "We'll decide patents, YOU get to do the enforcement." The process is unbelievably biased in favor of large corporations with stables of IP (intellectual property) attorneys.

Amen. I'm sure you know one of the saddest examples of great men who have been beaten, quite literally to death, by corporate patent thieves: Edward Howard Armstrong, the inventor, among many other things, of FM radio.

Anyone wishing to play the patent game would be well-advised to research his story as well as those of the inventors of intermittent wiper blades and the push-to-release socket wrench. While some inventors do indeed *eventually* get to reap the benefit of their ingenuity, most end up mired in patents suits that make even bitter divorces look amicable.

Can you imagine what other remarkable inventions he could have brought to the world were he not occupied with the unending patent battles that eventually led him to end his own life? We should cherish people with such genius, not grind them to death under the wheels of "justice."

Bob Kearns, inventor of the intermittent wiper blade, found that out the hard way. His permanent partial blindness from a wedding night champagne cork that hit him in the eye turned out to be an inspiration. While driving in the rain he was distracted by the wiper's regular motion. He wondered why a wiper couldn't be more like an eyelid and just sweep occasionally. He built and patented a remarkably simple 4 part windshield motor only to find Ford and others eventually using it without licensing it.

The first auto maker he sued offered him thirty million dollars to settle ou t of court. But he refused because he thought it wasn't fair. It took 12 years for the case to come to trial. Twelve YEARS!!!! His determination to see the case through cost him his wife and his health. After a three week trial the jury returned a verdict: They found infringement, but they awarded him a measly $5 million dollars - a far cry from the $1.6 billion he wanted or the $30 million he was offered right at the start. Can you imagine your financial future riding on the opinions of twelve random chosen non-technical, non-business literate jurors? What else might Bob Kearns have invented had he not been sent through the mill?

-- Bobby G.

Steve Uhrig re: web photos I see an amazing life-full of experiences in the surveilance world, Post long and prosper!

Where might this Junior Engineer go for Marketing help? Ryan Witta BSEE PSU 2002

I agree Kearns was not the best case, but it was the one I could remember! I agree he was unrealistic in not settling but I also see how he could feel if one car maker was willing to throw him a $30 million bone, the rest would or should. IIRC, by settling, he was losing the option of recovery from other automakers.

Who knows what insane advice he was given by attorneys. Attorneys that are paid by the hour have this tendency to prolong rather than solve disputes. For all I know Kearns went pro se and got the fool lawyer that old proverb talks about. Yes, he was not the best example but his case still shows how long, bitter and unrewarding patent suits can be. I think the inventor of the Sears push-to-release fared somewhat better in the court system but IIRC, he spent most of his life getting them to cough up the money.

Here's a case about a dead chicken washing patent/trade secret fight that's par for the course:

"Peter Roberts sued Sears, Roebuck and Co. in 1969 for patent infringement. In 1964, when he was an 18-year-old Sears employee, Roberts had invented a socket wrench. He sold the rights to the patent on the wrench to Sears for $10,000. Roberts later argued that Sears deliberately underestimated the tool's sales potential, which proved to be in the millions of dollars. He eventually received an $8.5 million settlement from the retail giant in

How can justice take so long? What kind of life would he have had had they paid him, fair and square, right up front?

Armstrong's bitter and life-long patent troubles are the best example of the effect of patent law on human beings. He got screwed, and badly, by people who once were his closest friends. He gave many of his patents to the US government gratis for use in W.W.II and advanced radio technology on a dozen different fronts. There's a great recounting of the story on the DVD "Empire of the Air" by Ken Burns. I highly recommend it.

I'm not sure that in the long run that invention didn't save the world's carmakers at least that much. I'd say, based on settlement offers I've seen before, if Ford was offering $30M they thought they might be on the hook for $100M. Multiply that by the Big Three and the rest of the world's carmakers and I can see where he got his pricing ideas. I also think he included a great deal of "punishment for stealing" money as punitive damages. The $5M jury verdict was way too low, IMHO, especially considering the first offer from a single car maker. It's pretty ironic that he could pull down a $5M reward and still feel he got the royal screw. What a world.

The real inequity is in the creation of corporate entities that have many of the rights of human beings, but also have the advantage of potentially eternal life. When you expect to live forever, you can simply play a waiting game and grind down any poor, limited life span entity like a human being. Twenty years is nothing to Sears and if the plaintiff dies in the meantime, they won't shed any tears. I think that they prolong these things HOPING that the inventor dies. Regrettably, things seem to be getting worse instead of better in the Corporation V. Human department. The Feds broke up ATT as monopolistic but like the liquid metal Terminator, the pieces are slowly joining back up to wreak havoc on consumers once again.

-- Bobby G.

While the point you're making is very valid, I think Bob Kearns' particular story is not the best example. He could have (and should have) taken the $30 million and enjoyed his life of leisure. In this particular example he was just greedy. In fact, the story points out the dark side of inventors who think that they are entitled to way more than an invention is worth. His desire for 1.6 billion demonstrates that he really didn't understand the commercial value of his invention. That being said, most cases of infringement are met with attorneys who offer little or nothing and just bully the inventor into dropping his suit for little or no compensation.

From:Robert Green ROBERT snipped-for-privacy@YAH00.COM

English is like a sloppy desk; cleaning it up actually gets less work done.

And furthermore, Engineers' are'nt no good at writing anyhow. We do however, generate ample employment for technical writers.

Anyhow, I mortally accept your writing proper critque. I only hope to inspire the unproper writers of the world... to live on! and turn spell checkin off... with a vengence!

That's spelled "z" or "Z" however it sounds best to you..

Learning to write proper English may be the most important skill you can develop.

Good luck in your work.

Steve

I worked on software for a startup company that had their own 360 camera hardware at the point where they were ready to mass produce them. But the CEO wanted to do what I call "patent squatting" instead of making something out of the technology.

What I saw on the screen after converting the polar images into panoramic images was that the lack of resolution in a normal video camera severely limits the clarity of the converted panos. The cameras I worked with could not allow the viewer to recognize the letters on a license plate if the camera were placed several feet away. We could just barely make them out. I'd like to see the best resolution that a 360 -> pano image can offer before getting up hopes on how useful the technology can be.

Also I found out that it's not possible for a dual-CPU 2.8 GHZ 1GB ram system to keep up with the data rate of the incoming video frames if each frame has to be converted. If the conversion only uses part of the polar image then it may be able to keep up. (But anything above 15 FPS is ok with me as a viewer, though. I don't need the full frame rate in order to perceive smooth movement.)

IMO: Low res, non-clear, low frame rates are what can be expected when converting 360 polar into rectangular panos unless something is done to make use of higher resolution video as well as faster processors and more efficient conversion software.

I feel that there are uses, though and I think one of them is to protect a wide area using motion detection and maybe even use a 360 camera to automatically aim a pan-tilt camera automatically. I would love to try a 360 camera mounted on a remote control car and drive it using viewing software to simulate the view from the driver point of view. But if you want to see the face of the person on your porch, I doubt

Just my opinion on the nature of the technology that I was involved with.

Dave

Thanks Dave That got me worried again, What is your def of patent squatting, How am I limited/affected by this method.

My prototype [thread 3] is motion capture [timestamp is slow ftp issue] using non optic surfaces @ x10 resolution , it does improve with cam corder at higher res. giving 3-4 fps w 1.6ghz cpu, ok for me considering intended applications and that it was VB6. I am bsee not bscs. I'll have it optimized later.

Ryan

XCam, XCam2, ScanCam, XCam Anywhere, Anaconda Imager CMOS Sensor Format 1/3" Array Size NTSC: 510 X 492 Resolution: 310 TV Lines Scanning: 2:1 Interlace Auto Shutter: 1/60 to 1/15,000 sec. Minimum Illumination: 3 LUX (f1.9) Operating Temp.: -10C to 40C Humidity Limits 0 - 95% Field of View: 60 degrees Power Required: 12VDC Water Resistant - do not submerge or place in standing water

Hi Ryan,

I'll try to explain what I mean by patent squatting...in a long roundabout way...

I didn't mean to cast a pessimistic shadow over the invention. I just wanted to express my views on what the performance was that I witnessed. The camera I worked with was a self-contained type with the camera unit (small CCD type with focus lens) inside the housing.

Unfortunately, the CEO that I worked for didn't really have a feel for R&D, nor sales, IMO. I tried to get her to consider making something that the company could sell and she just wanted to use her camera to capture some funding from whoever might want to pay her. I was her only programmer and the thing I wanted to make was something that could be sold. IMO She wanted to sell vaporware (by asking for funding without having a plan for how to return the value to the fund provider). My biggest gripe about that was that I knew that software takes quite a while to develop unless you've already written something similar before....and I wanted to get started working on the software since I knew it would take a while. She wanted to either get someone at another company to provide funding to develop whatever using the camera as the heart of the project, or sue someone for patent infringement if the opportunity comes up. But she wasn't interested in getting started on a serious piece of software that accomplishes something for an end user. So I ended up quitting because there was a trust issue with her, plus I had trouble collecting my pay and other employees had the same problem.

I tried to convince her (not being much of a salesman myself) to sell kits that included software and hardware to make it easy for an experimenter or manufacturer to make use of the camera technology. She had no idea what to make except that whatever the software does, it needs to 1: support wireless transmission of video, 2: provide a way to see a pano instead of the raw polar frames. That was the limit of her ideas. A CEO without a vision, except to get funded by someone, somehow. So I wrote a demo for her (without wireless support) and she showed it to some people she brought in. The people were disappointed in the way it looked. I was disappointed too because I couldn't figure out any way for software to solve the clarity issues. It was a limit in the video resolution that really ended up being the most frustrating problem. Going to a progressive scan expensive type of camera might be one answer.

I was trying to find a way to improve the conversion speed and I came up with a couple of ideas at the time.

2: Try to find a way to replace the floating point trig Sine and Cosine functions with fixed point. I tried to solve this one and failed to improve the perf after writing a fixed point tabel-lookup sine and cosine. Problem with that was that the time it took to do a table lookup of the answer was so long that it ended up taking longer than using the floating point in the first place. That's the way R&D goes.

I'd be glad to talk more about it offline if you want. Feel free to email me at yah oo at dav ee dot com. (remove the blanks and change 'dot' to '.').

Regards, Dave

She did not have any patents but had a few pending. I don't know what was in them, unfortunately.

That doesn't surprise me at all. You already know, I'm sure, that after converting polar to rect, the pixel density near the center will be stretched across the entire top area of the pano...(if the top represents the center of the ccd). That's where I saw that our (their) camera was poorest, near the top of the pano. But not using the center of the CCD solves that one pretty well. Most of the stuff one wants to see is near the equator.

I just did a search and found one of her patents. I won't post the # here but will give via email if you want to look at it. I'm going to see if I can find more of hers.

I normally over-react just for fun.

Did she / you have a patent?

There was a UV Prague project that used a camera with the pixel count increasing to the center of the ccd. Can you believe it!

Dave I imagine hundreds of "claims"... I would not know if I had done a truely thurough patent search.

I am concerned, however... This polar to rectangular has got to be common knowledge art practice....cartography. Mirrored balls have been around since the dawn of time, if I get sued; i'll source Merlin the Magician.

Maybe copyright on software is an issue? but my code is truly mine.

What do you think?

You really need to get some advice from a patent attorney. Don't rely just on the opinions of the group no matter how well intentioned they may be.

From:z snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com

I'll form my own opinion about paying a patent attorney as well. Thats not a gaurantee either. Looking at the previous posts.