CES 2015: Giroptic 360cam [video]

Posted By Mat Lee in Tech, Video

BreakingModern – One of the really cool things I saw at CES 2015 came from a French company called Giroptic. Giroptic’s product is called the 360cam, and as you would expect, its name pretty much sums it up. In short, the 360cam gives you a full HD 360 degree recorded stream at 2048×1024 resolution at 30 frames per second. It’s packed with three 185 degree fisheye lenses that are connected to an on-board chip for processing on the fly. It really doesn’t get much easier than that.

Kickstarter to CES

Giroptic successfully funded a Kickstarter campaign for the 360cam on July 4, 2014, with 3,916 backers who funded over $1.4 million dollars out of a $150,000 goal. I got a chance to talk with the people at the Giroptic booth during CES 2015. Check out the video below.

Not only is the cam a reality, but at CES Giroptic announced the added capability to stream your footage directly to YouTube, and also to Google Street View. This will allow owners to more easily and accurately map every place you bring the 360cam.

Video: CES 2015 Giroptic 360cam

It records high quality audio, too, due to the three microphones that are packed into this cool little form factor. It also has built in GPS, so you can easily have your images (or videos) geotagged. Giroptic even managed to fit a gyroscope inside for superb image stabilization.

At CES Giroptic showed off a light socket adapter that’s built into the device. This will let you screw your 360cam into any normal light socket, which will not only power your camera, but capture 360 degrees and act as a security camera all at the same time. If you can afford the $500 price tag each, you could put one of these in every room of your house, getting complete visual awareness of your home at any given time.

The 360cam is, of course, also a camera. It has an 8 MP photo capability that takes 4096×2048 shots at three frames per second. With all the gleaming hardware, on top of decent lenses and a processor dedicated to stitching everything together, the 360cam looks a lot like what Photo Sphere could have been, had it been a standalone piece of hardware.

You can get your footage off the 360cam in mp4 and jpg formats. It has three shooting modes: live video streaming over Wi-Fi, regular videos that record to the microSD card and photo mode. And, as if that wasn’t enough, in photo mode you get time lapse, a timer, HDR and burst.

On the Giroptic Kickstarter page it states:

“The 360cam files are standard equirectangular projections, compatible with most 360 degree video & photo players (KRpano, Kolor Eyes)…”

But, of course, if you want the best experience, Giroptic recommends you use its proprietary player.

If you check out the store right now, you can get yourself one of these cool cameras, and a bunch of nifty accessories to help you maximize your shots. Giroptic has everything from the $79 light bulb adapter to a $279 Ethernet POE video streaming base. There’s also monopods and extra batteries for around $30. Not too bad — you can bet I’ll be asking Santa for one of these next year. Although, by then, I’m sure Giroptic will have something way cooler for us to play with.

Be sure to check out the rest of our CES 2015 coverage, too. Thanks for reading.

For BMod, I’m Mat Lee.

All images/screenshots: Mat Lee