[marak830]

My IT dept wants me to buy this crazy over priced 360deg webcam for meetings that focuses the on person speaking using "ai"(you know, instead of picking up which mic is getting the higher volume).

Edit: I'm guessing this req didn't come from IT, but from some c-suite.

[ffsm8]

What do you mean by crazy overpriced? Quality webcams usually cost around 300, which might look expensive to an uninformed - but it's a fair price for the product you get. The lens they're using is just more expensive which you can easily see if you look at the resulting video

I.e.

* Opal C1 (as good as it gets wrt picture quality, no 360) ( https://opalcamera.com/opal-c1 )

* Insta360 ( https://www.insta360.com/product/insta360-link ). Pretty sure this products "AI" marketing predates the current AI craze. They were using regular vision detection from what I recall (which has been a thing long before LLMs). And all the other features work very well too (noise cancelling microphone, gesture control etc).

[etrautmann]

Probably the owl cam for >$1000

[ffsm8]

That's not classic webcam though and it's definitely not overpriced if it works as advertised.

Getting a 360° video feed that's automatically cropped to 4k into the correct direction while keeping the audio feed stable from multiple microphones etc...

these kinds of conference room solutions often go into the range of multiple thousand.

If it works as advertised at least. It probably doesn't, but I've got no experience with that company. I just can't see them creating a good 360° feed wile outputting quality 4k video cropped to the person speaking in that budget. You'd realistically need multiple of the lenses like the opus C1 as fishlens wouldn't allow you to keep the 4k Output looking good enough.

I'd have expected a device at least 4x the size with a price of 10k at minimum for the features they're advertising

[marak830]

Ding we have a winner. Quite a bit more than that if I remember correctly.