360cameras

Filmed with an Insta360 X5 camera mounted on the handlebar.

It's 2am here in the North and the lake is misting up because dawn is about to break.

Boaty McBoatface here is finally getting a good scrub and going back on the water today, after years of neglect.

My Norwegian wood stack is taking shape. I split a few logs today and laid down the first two layers.

Here's another 360° view:

This is good fun - and good exercise too!

A printable adapter ring to improve the placement of the Puluz aftermarket lens guards for Ricoh Theta cameras on the Ricoh Theta X and make them removable.

If you own a dual-lens 360° camera, you know how easy it is to scratch the lenses and how much any scratch degrades the image, due to the short focal length of fisheye lenses.

And if you own a Ricoh Theta camera, you know the lenses regrettably aren't replaceable.

Many Ricoh Theta owners install the Puluz lens guards for Ricoh Theta SC2, S or V onto their cameras to protect the camera's lenses, although the lens guards tend to degrade the image a bit: if the lens guards get damaged, they only cost $25 to replace, which is much cheaper than the entire camera.

Unfortunately, the Puluz lens guards aren't designed for the Theta X, and are too small to fit smartly on the larger lens bases of the X. They can be installed, but they don't hold very well, and they sit too high, often creating blurry stitch lines.

With a little modification to the Puluz lens guards and a pair of this printable adapter ring, it's possible to make the lens guards sit lower onto the Theta X's lenses and hold onto he lens bases by friction alone, making them easily removable if you want to maximize image quality occasionally, without having to peel them off and glue them back on

The modified Puluz lens guards don't sit a lot lower - maybe half a millimeter at the most - but it's enough to improve the stitch line noticeably:

You can find the STEP model for the adapter ring and instructions to modify the Puluz lens guards in this Github repo:

https://github.com/Giraut/ricoh_theta_x_3d-printed_accessories/

After a nice afternoon splitting wood (yes, this is my idea of a good time exercising 🙂), my main wood stack has grown to a height that I deem barely safe. It's 6 times as high as it is wide now, and it's getting quite wobbly.

I've run out of space to stack wood the conventional way. But I have so much wood left to split that I really want to try building a Norwegian wood stack next:

This is our local swimming pool's facade covered with stainless steel tiles. I passed by it this morning on my way to work, and it had just stopped raining, so I figured I'd stop by to take a picture.

Those simple tiles add a lot to this plain, utilitarian building, creating a mesmerizing visual effect when the wind blows:

This is a 360° stereoscopic panorama of the sunset over our lake this evening. To view it, download the image and open it in a stereo viewer such as Bino, setting the viewer as follows:

• Surround 360°
• Input 3D above-below → Input top/bottom
• Choose the output method of your choice if you have VR equipment, or Output 3D side-by-side → Output Right/Left and cross your eyes until the two images merge and the 3D scene appears

I don't have VR equipment myself. I use the eye-crossing method.

If you've never tried to view a stereogram this way, the key to success is to keep the screen a good distance away from your eyes - at least at the beginning - and keep your eyes as parallel to the pair of photos as possible: cross your eyes until you brain "latches" onto the 3D image and naturally keeps your eyes crossed. If you head is tilted even slightly, it's a lot harder to achieve, if not downright impossible. Once you get the knack, it only takes a split second to bring the two images together.

In this particular sphere, the 3D effect is mostly visible on closer objects, such as the trees and the building behind you. The initial view, which points at houses across the lake, has very little 3D effect, but is easier to latch onto.

The Ricoh Theta X is a great camera, but it has one dreadful shortcoming: its lenses aren't replaceable. Puluz lens guards may be used to protect the lenses. Here's a 3D-printed lens cover that fits over the Puluz lens guards.

Like all fisheye-style 360 cameras, the Ricoh Theta X's focal length is so short that any scratch on the lenses will create a blurry spot in the image. And because the lenses need to stick out to capture the image all around the camera, they're very exposed and very, VERY easy to scratch.

In other words, one wrong move, one small mishap, and there goes you expensive Ricoh camera.

Fortunately, it's possible to install Puluz lens guards on the Theta X. They're really designed for the Theta SC2, S or V models, and they're not a perfect fit on the Theta X. But they stay in place well enough to work, and they have almost no impact on the image quality.

At least with those lens guards, if you drop the camera, you can simply replace the lens guard for very cheap rather than the whole camera.

The Puluz lens guards stick out even more than the camera's own lenses though, so no lens cover will fit, and the silicone "eyepatch" supplied by Puluz isn't terribly convenient in my opinion.

So I added a deeper version of my 3D-printed lens cover that will accommodate the Puluz lens guards. You can get the model in this repo:

https://github.com/Giraut/ricoh_theta_x_3d-printed_accessories

The Verge tries Splatica, which uses Insta360 cameras, Antigravity drones, and Gaussian splats to help creators easily reconstruct real-world scenes in 3D.

I need to have an excavator dig up our lakefront beach to remove leftover tree and bush stumps, so it's walkable barefoot again. So I'm asking quotations from various companies, and I'm sending them these photos. As a result, they can all give me a rough estimate rightaway without having to come see the site.

How useful is that!

It's midnight and the night has been banished at the arctic circle.

This is a long exposure shot made by combining the 275 individual 360° photos taken to make this timelapse video. It's only 90 minutes worth of shots, but the star trails are quite visible - and so is the gorgeous northern light show we got last night.

The star trails don't look quite straight, despite the camera being absolutely still the whole time. Unfortunately, the stitching process tends to shift the images ever so slightly at random, so the photos aren't perfectly aligned in pitch and yaw from one to the next. Shame...

I went down to the lake to shoot a couple of photospheres of the sunrise. Just as I got setup, a powerful geomagnetic storm rolled in and produced vivid northern lights. Too late to automate it: I manually took one photo every 20 seconds until the battery ran out. This is the resulting timelapse video.

For best viewing, immediately zoom all the way out and look about 45° to your left. That's where most of the initial auroral action is. I haven't found a way to set the pitch / yaw / fov of the video viewer, unfortunately.