360 Panoramic Camera

Overview

A 360-degree panoramic camera captures the full sphere around it, simultaneously recording front and back. Rather than panning a single camera across a scene, it uses dual fisheye lenses pointing in opposite directions. Each Lens Assembly sees a 180-degree hemispherical field of view; together they cover the entire 360° × 240° solid angle (missing only the nadir, straight down, and zenith, straight up, poles unless the camera is on a monopod).

The Front Fisheye Lens and Rear Fisheye Lens feed light to two synchronized sensors mounted on the Internal Bracket. Both sensors produce raw Bayer images at the same instant, timed by a shared sync pulse. The Stitching Processor then warps both images from fisheye (distorted) projection into equirectangular projection (the standard 360° format), geometrically aligns them at the horizontal seam, and blends them with a smooth transition so no visible seam remains. The output is a single rectangular 360° image ready for spherical video playback.

The blended panorama is encoded by the Main Board SoC and written to local Storage or streamed over Connectivity Module to a mobile app or cloud service. The Battery Pack provides 60–90 minutes of recording on a single charge, and the camera mounts to a tripod or selfie stick via the Mount Adapter.

How it works

The two sensors are wired to a common trigger line; when the Main Board MCU fires the sync pulse, both sensors expose their pixels at identical moments and read them out in parallel. The ISP IC applies color correction and noise reduction to both streams independently, producing two synchronized YUV frames.

These frames arrive at the Stitching Processor. The Stitch FPGA runs a geometric warping algorithm: it uses a Warp LUT ROM lookup table (precomputed during factory calibration) to map every pixel in the fisheye image to its corresponding direction in equirectangular space. Fisheye images are radially distorted (straight lines become curves), so this remapping stretches the image near the edges but preserves the integrity of distant objects.

Once both hemispheres are warped to equirectangular, the Blending ASIC finds the overlap region (where the front and rear cameras' fields meet on the left and right edges of the spherical surface) and performs multi-band blending. It decomposes both images into a Laplacian pyramid, blends each band with a smooth transition kernel, and collapses the pyramid back to a composite. This eliminates visible seams and exposure differences between the two cameras.

The stitched panorama is a single equirectangular frame (4096×2048 or 4096×4096 pixels), which the Main Board SoC encodes to H.265 and buffers to Storage. Metadata tagging (timecode, lens distortion parameters, blending shift distance) is embedded so post-production software can recompute the stitch or adjust color grading across the seam. The entire process runs at full frame rate with sub-100 ms latency, so real-time monitoring on a mobile app over Connectivity Module shows a live 360° preview.