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How would you feel if you had access to video footage taken with a 360° camera of the world from a baby’s perspective? This is a question I find interesting to answer. I decided to try this experiment a few days ago. The limitation of most cameras is that they only show what is within the field of view. They only show what the photographer or camera operator felt was worth capturing.
With a 360° camera placed at the child’s eye level you can see everything from their perspective. You can see the entire room and you can look up to see the grown ups or down to see the hands and other objects on the ground. You can also see the underside of chairs and tables. With VR goggles you would see the world from that perspective.
Imagine a birthday or Christmas party from this perspective. You would see the opening of presents, the reaction of the infant but also of the grown ups, of the brothers and sisters and maybe pets if there are any around.
I think that this way of documenting the world would be most interesting for the child when she becomes a teenager or grown up. Imagine the pleasure that could be had by seeing how everyone looked at this time. Conventional cameras are always missing at least one person. With 360 cameras everyone would be in the image. The camera operator becomes part of the scene.
One advantage of 360° videos is that they cover what is taking place in front and behind the camera so people may behave more naturally than if a standard video or photo camera was pointing at them. I love being behind video cameras rather than in front. With 360 cameras I am forced to be in frame. I believe that people will behave in a more natural manner than if they were filmed by a conventional camera.
We see how people enjoy letters and paintings, photographs and conventional videos. Imagine how much enjoyment people would get from taking a step back in time. Imagine looking at the furniture, the gadgets, the architecture from a decade or two ago.
Today I dropped by the apple store and bought an ipod touch at the same time as a friend. both of us were speaking about how we were going to wait the five hours before the device was charged. I didn’t. I plugged it into the laptop and let it charge for five hours that way
So far there are a number of features I love about this device. The first of these is the screen. it’s nice and wide and it’s slim which means it’s easier to carry. Wifi works great whether the network is protected and both the itunes store and youtube are quick to access. Further to this the safari browser works well for browsing news articles whilst within range of wifi hotspots. You can browse several websites at once if you so desire.
Among those things I think are limiting is the lack of a proper keyboard. I often find myself pressing one key and finding that another one is pressed. As a result I may have to spend a few hours getting used to a virtual keyboard. If you hold the device horizontal rather than vertical the problem is somewhat resolved.
More to come as I gain more experience
I always go to social media events and meet a lot of geeks who love to use new technology such as twitter, seesmic and more. For once it’s a little different. I’m in Fribourg where I’m surrounded by writers. There are a lot of PC rather than Mac computers. The hot chocolate is good and the city is nice.
At the time of writing there have been two word wars. The concept is simple. Write solidly for five minutes at a time and see who has the highest word count. So far I’ve written 313 and then 328 in two sessions, not bad.
Word count is now over 24,000 words.
While in Spain for three weeks I was playing with the Xtorm solar Charger. I found that it worked well for the charging of tablets and e-book readers but not mobile phones.
For years I have wanted to play with solar power. I have wanted to buy a solar panel that I could fix to my bag or that I could use to charge devices. I often looked at the price and weight and changed my mind. I don’t want something that adds kilos to my load, especially if I am climbing.
With a small device like the one pictured above you can carry it with you and use it to charge devices. When you drive to the hike or climb, or when you stop for lunch or a drink you can take out this device and start charging your phone, gps, led lights or other devices.
if you want to charge devices to 100 percent then I would recommend charging ipads, ebooks, gps watches and other devices with this device. I found that it’s great for providing a phone with a top up charge but that because of my mobile use patterns it will only provide one full charge per day.
When we hear people speak about solar power we always hear about “How do we store the power we generate so that we can use it when we need it?” and I found a way. When I woke up in the morning I would put the solar charger near a window or outside if there was no chance of rain to charge up to over 75 percent. When it reached this charge I connected the solar charger to a 10,000mah external battery.
It is by using this technique that I have been able to keep my external battery fully charged with no need to plug it in to mains power. In effect it means that I can charge the ipad, the phone or the e-book reader without using mains power.
It has a 6000mah battery and can charge two devices at once.
If I was designing such a device I would ensure that the battery could charge within an 8-12hr window rather than 15. I found that to recharge the internal battery fully it would take two days.
This type of device needs to be rugged. It has to be rain resistant and transport resistant. I want to be able to leave it exposed to the sun without having to worry about the risk of rain. I would also like it to feel solid enough to be fixed to a bag when hiking or climbing. In it’s current configuration I would leave it near the bag when sitting for lunch or when at a climbing wall. I would not fix it to my bag during a via ferrata.
I’m happy with this solar charger. I have found the ideal use case for it and I look forward to experimenting with it over the summer. I think it would benefit from having a battery half the size that could be fully charged in half the time. It now tempts me to get a second larger solar panel to keep the laptop charged over the summer months.
I haven’t blogged in a few months but I have been tweeting, and working full time, and I’m attempting Nanowrimo once again this year.
Last year the process was easier as I had a lot of free time. This year I need to make time.
I did get to over 20,000 words but inspiration is slower to come. The meetups are still going on. We’ve had two in Lausanne already, one in Zurich, one in Bern and the next will be in Basel. I think I’ll skip Basel as I have some more urgent projects to finish first.
Did I mention over 1.3 billion words have been logged for Nanowrimo? That’s after 18 days of writing.