Hi HN, Three of us have conceived, designed, and launched Sphericam 2 on Kickstarter. We're now halfway through the campaign and have raised over $220K with backers paying $1299 and up for a camera that will be shipping in December.
Our Pitch: VR is awesome but there's no content. Shooting 360 video currently is a total nightmare. We want to make it easy and fun. Our camera makes "native resolution" in Gear VR or Google Cardboard.
This project follows Sphericam 1 which I launched on Kickstarter in late 2012 - we did ok, sold 100 of them, but the tech wasn't there and the market wasn't nearly there (Oculus hadn't happened yet).
As a hardware startup we are working with lots of constraints, bottlenecks, and pain points around going from prototype to production, but we all have some experience with that.
Our next tasks are to ship in December, while scaling our sales model and manufacturing, and of course, keeping the product refreshed as the resolution of VR goes up year after year ;-)
Our Kickstarter is here:
http://kickstarter.com/projects/1996234044/sphericam-2-the-4k-360o-video-camera-for-virtual-r
cheers,
Jeffrey Martin
The global shutter is particularly impressive.
What's the sensor(s) that you're using in the camera? I'm guessing that you've not developed it yourselves, although I could be wrong!