Technology. Isn’t it wonderful

Just to get things looking right on my blog, a quick little article about what I currently ‘love’

Being able to keep both feet on the ground, but take aerial images and videos is now possible thanks to “drones” Whilst you can get a few ‘toys’ that you can play with, the ‘heavy duty’ versions with motorised gimbal stabilisers to create rock steady images still run into thousands of Pounds. Not quite got that sort of budget yet.

Another interesting product is “360 photography” This is a simple camera with two sensors and two lenses that each photograph 180 degrees. Depending on how the resultant images and videos are ‘stitched’ together, you can create “small planet” videos (it appears as a circle, and everything moves around the ‘surface’ of the planet) or create a view whereby you can ‘pan around’ inside the video. On a desktop computer, you might move the mouse to the left to see what’s on the left of that viewpoint, or to the right to see the other side. When using VR devices, you can physically look to the left and the right, and the image you see changes.

Taking the concept a stage further, you can create what are called “walk throughs” You click a mouse on a certain point – such as a doorway – and a new 360 is loaded which allows you to look behind you to where you were ‘standing’ just now, or move forward into the next room. This is something that is starting to be used by real estate vendors (or estate agents as we call them in UK) to allow people to view a property without actually physically going to view the house.

More technical insights to follow at another time.