Kogeto comes full circle with Joey seamless 360-degree 4K video camera
A panoramic camera with a lot of potential uses, Joey lets you capture, broadcast and interact with the world it sees.
- More than two decades experience writing about PCs and accessories, and 15 years writing about cameras of all kinds.
It all started with Lucy.
You may have heard the name Kogeto before thanks to a very successful Kickstarter campaign for Dot, its iPhone camera lens attachment for shooting 360-degree video.
But before that, Kogeto made Lucy, a large, yet still portable and affordable professional panoramic video camera. And now, there's Joey.
Joey is the evolution of Lucy and Dot, combining a 13-megapixel camera sensor and a Snapdragon 800 quad-core processor to churn out 360-degree 3,840x720-pixel resolution panoramic video at 30 frames per second.
The camera and motherboard are Kogeto's own design and the whole thing is running on Android and controlled by the built-in 4-inch touchscreen. You can interact with videos via Kogeto's Looker app for iOS and Android and the camera can be remotely controlled, too. (Go to Kogeto's site to see what I mean.)
Unlike other panoramic video cameras, there is just one camera in Joey, so there are no seams or overlapping images and dewarping of the video is done on the fly. And it can all be shared instantly online with Kogeto's preexisting panoramic video ecosystem.
We had a chance to see Joey in action firsthand and came away impressed with all that it had to offer and its wide variety of potential applications -- from monitoring classroom lectures to security to live two-way teleconferencing with face recognition and, of course, film-making.
Kogeto plans to sell Joey for $1,300. The Kickstarter campaign allows the first 50 backers to grab one for only $750 with an estimated delivery date of December 2014. (Pricing converts to about £460 or AU$860, with an an additional $30/£20/AU$35 charge for shipping outside of the US.) The price goes up to $850 for the rest of the campaign, which currently has 15 days remaining (converted, that's about £525 or AU$970).