[jffry]

  What it can’t do quite yet is survive a hard fall, but the company is working on that and expects to have durability testing finished this year...

Isn't its durability kind of one of the major selling points? The primary use of these is to throw them into hazardous environments. It seems to me like getting the electronics into a package that would survive the beating would be priority #1

[michaelt]

If the aim is to gather a panoramic image while in the air, I would have thought priority #1 would be getting a compact sensor that didn't suffer motion blur when flying and spinning at the same time, in low light conditions, with battery power, low weight and a tiny lens.

I mean, my phone camera produces poor images when I'm trying to hold it still, whereas a thrown ball can fly at 80mph or spin at 20-30 revolutions per second.

[jffry]

At SIGGRAPH 2010, Microsoft Research showed off a technique [1] where they attached an IMU (measures acceleration/rotation) to a DSLR. They recorded motion and used it to deblur the image.

A ball flying and spinning through the air should have a fairly simple blur, though of a potentially much higher magnitude. I'm not familiar enough with the state-of-the-art, but my gut tells me that post-facto image processing could yield impressive results.

This also doesn't have to be extremely high-res sensors. A lower-resolution sensor with larger pixels would collect more light, allowing for a faster shutter speed, meaning less blur.

[1]: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/im...

[michaelt]

I'm not saying it's impossible or anything. If they wanted to they could just put a bright flash on, or wait for the camera to roll to a stop, or buy a crazy high performance sensor.

I'm just saying, if I was running the company, that's the problem I'd be most worried about getting right.

[DanBC]

> Isn't its durability kind of one of the major selling points?

Or you make them cheap enough to be semi-disposable. That way it only needs to survive long enough to transmit the images back. If they find a surviving ball that's a bonus.

[jffry]

Sure, but presumably these devices (and included sensors to measure things like temperature, oxygen/CO/CO2 levels, etc) could be much more useful if they would survive being thrown into the building, bouncing around, and coming to rest, and then being able to still provide useful telemetry. They might slowly melt in a fire, but in other scenarios (e.g. a HAZMAT situation), they wouldn't be terribly useful if they couldn't survive long enough to come to rest.

[zacharycohn]

They didn't define "hard fall." It's possible it's fine for throwing about right now, but it wouldn't survive being dropped from a second story window.

[gojomo]

If they reasonably believe durability is possible (though expensive or otherwise deferrable), it makes perfect sense to build a fragile but feature-impressive initial version, to demonstrate the benefits, then harden later.

Look at their team:

http://bounceimaging.com/?page_id=260

Do you really think they've missed something simple like the right prototyping priorities for selling into their target markets?

[jffry]

That's quite a team. The article's light on details, but I have to assume that they have already been doing durability design and that the article is just light on the details.