There’s always some new visual technology trying to break into the mainstream, whether it’s to try to improve the way we experience things or make a bit of money. The quality, however, varies wildly. At the moment, we’re entering a new age of virtual reality (VR); this has created an interesting new set of visual experiences that has inspired James Mitchell.

The full article can be found in The MagPi 49 and was written by Rob Zwetsloot.

“Recently, there has been a rush of 360-degree VR videos online,” James tells us. “They’re really impressive. Loving the technical side of photography and the Raspberry Pi, it seemed only logical that I would try and build something that would allow me to recreate those videos using the Raspberry Pi.”

And so he did with the Zero360: a bank of Raspberry Pi Camera Modules arranged in a circle, connected to Pi Zeros. They can all take a photo at once; these are then stitched together to make a 360-degree panorama.

Why make it out of Pi Zeros, though? James explains that cost was a big factor:

“The issue is that the equipment for making 360-degree videos is extremely expensive. Using the Raspberry Pi, it’s a fraction of the cost. You could argue that the Zero360 is not really that cheap when you could use your mobile phone or even a DSLR camera, but those would only take a single still image and need a user to move the camera around, whereas the Zero360 can take stills from all angles at the same time and repeatedly. Those stills can be made into a time-lapse. Also, video is an option! These features don’t normally come that cheap!”

The housing for the system was quick to make, once James had managed to procure enough Raspberry Pi Zeros; however, the code took a few weeks on and off to get working. Two Raspberry Pi 3s are also used in the project to stitch the image together, and the build is otherwise just made up of Pi Zeros, Camera Modules, and power cables.“I’m using Raspbian Lite on all the Pis, with the raspistill and picamera Python libraries,” James explains. “I also managed to stitch the images on the Pi 3 using Hugin.”

Aside from some issues with getting the networking going, the whole project is pretty straightforward.

“Code-wise, there’s still a lot of work to do, so I can’t claim it’s doing what it does efficiently,” admits James. “But the final results are amazing! It’s especially cool that the images are stitched together on the Pi itself!”

James has plenty of plans to improve the Zero360 in the future, so it can make even better panoramas.