Bounce Imaging is the first and only true stabilized 360/VR video system in first-response.
It is an unfortunate reality that many companies will over-hype the capabilities of their technology in the hope of a quick sale. You may have heard, for example, a lot of providers say that their systems provide “360-degree situational awareness” because, for example, they have a robot that can spin around or switch from camera to camera to see different parts of a room.
But what good does that do you if the one user driving the robot or switching between cameras is looking to the left while a suspect walks by on the right?
And what good is a wide-angle view of a collapsed structure if you have no idea or reference points to figure out where that victim you’re looking at is trapped?
Or how does it help to have a horizontal 360-degree view if the action is happening above you on a stairwell?
Bounce Imaging provides REAL all-directions 360-degree/VR video, in real-time, stabilized horizontally and vertically, so many users can be looking in any direction on their phone and know which way they are looking based on that stabilization. If that’s hard to visualize, you don’t have to – we’ve used the magic of Facebook 360 video below to bring our camera’s video to a format you can see right in this post:
Notice how you can scan up, down, left, right freely – covering any angle. If your teammate were connected to this video, he/she could scan to the right as you look left, making sure nothing catches you by surprise. Also notice the slider bar along the bottom of the video – this is all recorded, so you can go back in time and review video from a totally different direction.
That’s clearly useful tactically – if you hear a thud from a corner of the attic you weren’t monitoring, you want to be able to go back in time and see what happened in that direction.
But 360-degree/VR recording (and by the way, you can turn recording off) is also useful for after-action reviews and training. Some teams use our cameras extensively for training – using the built-in 1/4-20 thread to hang it off a rope from the ceiling, running their scenarios, and then playing them back in 360-degree/VR video.
Note that I keep mentioning 360-degree/VR. When I say we provide 360-degree video, I’m actually understating the case a bit – we provide OMNIDIRECTIONAL video. That’s 360-degrees along all axes, meaning that you can put on our VR headset and look up at the roof, down at the floor, and all the way behind you.
Why doesn’t everyone do this?
It turns out that providing real-time, stabilized omnidirectional video in a small package, with extended battery life, and at a low-cost is technically very challenging. We know that because it took us three years working out of the Harvard Innovation Lab and MIT to figure it out, and the technology developed to do it fills up our four issued patents (with more pending). Rather than invest that kind of time and resources, many companies have stuck with older technology that will do an ok job with a fair amount of training and a bunch of compromises.
But ask yourself: Next time you’re clearing a stairwell or trying to find a victim in the rubble, do you want outdated tech with exaggerated claims, or do you want the cutting edge in total situational awareness?