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The 360-degree camera for spherical panoramas

Ricoh has developed a prototype for a camera that takes spherical panoramic images and immediately beams them to a smartphone.

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Lexy Savvides Principal Video Producer
Lexy is an on-air presenter and award-winning producer who covers consumer tech, including the latest smartphones, wearables and emerging trends like assistive robotics. She's won two Gold Telly Awards for her video series Beta Test. Prior to her career at CNET, she was a magazine editor, radio announcer and DJ. Lexy is based in San Francisco.
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Lexy Savvides

Ricoh has developed a prototype for a camera that takes spherical panoramic images and immediately beams them to a smartphone.

(Screenshot by CBSi)

Unveiled at the annual CP+ photography show in Japan, Ricoh's concept camera certainly looks like it belongs in the future. Unfortunately, there are no technical details available that explains how it actually works beyond its two 180-degree fish-eye lenses. The camera module stitches its images together and the panorama is sent wirelessly to a smartphone.

The results look impressive, especially when seeing a spherical panorama come together while pinching outwards from the image. The effect is somewhat similar to Google's Photo Sphere functionality, which first appeared in Android Jelly Bean.

At the moment, the concept only works for photos, but the developers hope to make it work with video as well. Find out more about this mysterious contraption below, from DigInfo.