Diverse And Unexpected Ways To Use Ladybug Cameras

Whether it be a real-estate application helping clients remotely choose their homes, providing innovative and immersive applications for experiencing concerts, or making meetings better with 360 teleconferencing, the versatile Ladybug cameras are the preferred choice for streaming high quality spherical video.

Virtual Open House

Choosing a home is never easy. Choosing a home that you aren't able to visit is even harder. e-rent, a German apartment rental agency, has made choosing the right home easier using the Ladybug3. e-rent helps corporations find furnished apartment rentals for their employees. As their clientele are not local and thus cannot visit the apartments, e-rent needed a way to capture and provide images that allows clients to virtually "walk through" the apartments through a web interface. 

e-rent's solution was the Rover – a remotely controlled spherical image capturing system specifically designed to capture steady panoramic video within the small confines of an apartment. The Macbook Pro is the recording device and is attached to the carrier system to eliminate extraneous cabling. The cameraman, who is often outside the apartment, controls the Rover's movements and image capture with another laptop connected via WLan.

e-rent uses LadybugCapPro Software with their Ladybug3 for image capture and Adobe Premiere CS6 for image processing. The Ladybug3 was chosen for its unique ability to stream 360° video, the maturity and ease of use of the LadybugCapPro Software, and the friendliness and responsiveness of the FLIR sales team.

Using spherical images in real-estate is a fairly new yet growing trend.  The ability to provide an immersive experience is a huge differentiator for e-rent and while there have been requests by other real estate agencies; the Rover is not for sale.

Experiencing Live Concerts In 360° - From Any Vantage Point

What's better than having the best seats at a concert? What about standing beside the drummer or switching and suddenly viewing the concert from beside the singer? That's the experience Mativision provides using multiple Ladybug cameras throughout a concert venue.

Mativision offers both custom projects as well as downloadable iPad, iPhone, and Facebook applications. Their systems synchronize up to 10 Ladybug spherical cameras to record an event from different positions throughout the show. Viewers use an interactive video player that not only allows them to pan 360° around the venue but it also allows them to switch between different vantage points while the audio and video remain in synch. This can be done both during a live show and afterwards with the recording.

One of the reasons Mativision chose Ladybug cameras is for their ability to handle a wide variety of lighting changes during a concert.  Mativision's founder, Anthony Karydis, explains, "The lighting in a rock concert makes imaging difficult as there will be very dark moments followed by very bright instances with altering colour and intensity.  We are able to alter the imaging parameters of the camera to achieve a good dynamic range".  Ladybug cameras are also small enough to not interfere with the performance and can be placed away from the control station so Mativision is not restricted by cable length, a major factor that has made Mativision a success.

Always an innovator, Mativision has recently released the Muse 360 app which provides the same personalized concert experience via a number of Apple products including the iPhone5, iPad 4, and iPad Mini.  It is available now via iTunes.

Is 360° Videoconferencing The Future?

Despite our reliance on email, text messages and even chats; studies show that face-to-face exchanges are still the most effective way of communicating. However, this can't always be the case in our global environment where meetings occur with participants from all over the globe. Videoconferencing is one way to achieve virtual face-to-face meetings and companies such as SimplyLive360 have started projects to meet this growing demand. Leveraging their experience with the Ladybug cameras, SimplyLive360 is building systems that allow meeting participants to pan around the meeting room in real-time. Off-site participants can view and listen to the meeting through a standard browser while choosing their viewing angle. In addition, dynamic information, in the form of text, graphics or video can be overlayed on top of the 360° video to help convey ideas better. Another innovative way to use Ladybug cameras.