We still need to test our underwater tripod, but in the meantime we have come up with a really interesting idea. What if we could take panoramas from the air using a remote-controlled drone? We recently obtained three Phantom drones, a Phantom One, Phantom Two, and a Phantom Two with a camera. In the past few weeks it has been too windy to fly them outside, as Waimea often is, but in the meantime we have been having fun with a remote controlled gimble that would stabilize a GoPro Hero 3+ if we put one on the drone. We found that we can program the drone using GPS and an app called "Ground Station" to fly a pre-defined course, stopping when we want it to take a scene, and spinning 360 degrees to allow the GoPro to take 7-8 images that could be stitched into a navigable panorama. Here is a course that surveys our campus:

We hope to use this to create an "air vr" of a donor's property down on the Kohala coast. Coupled with a normal vr from the ground and a possible underwater vr this could become a comprehensive survey of his land. Here are some photos of us flying the drone a few weeks ago when it wasn't windy:

Awkward smiles for the GoPro
Bo setting up the GPS on the drone. You have to move it in a circle.

It flies! And it crashes.
After a few mishaps it flies again, even higher! We estimate that it reached 500 feet at its highest.
We attracted a crowd of curious students.
Right after this photo was taken the wind picked up and we crashed it pretty badly, but after some new props and a motor it was flying again. Now I can't wait until the wind dies down and we can test the air vr. I'll post the results when I have them.

There was a recent idea floating around involving the possibility of an underwater virtual reality tour. Bo and I set out to make it a reality. We used a large box of various pieces of PVC pipe and connectors to slap together a crude underwater tripod. The idea is to put a gopro on the bottom and spin it from the top to get a full 360 degree view. If this could be made a reality, we could make virtual tours of popular dive spots or coral reefs just because we can. For now, we need to test it in the pool. Pictures to come.

So I got a new fisheye. It is a Rokinon 8mm F3.5, and I honestly couldn't be happier. For $279 I got a lens that gives me quality on par with the $800 Nikon fisheye, and there is no chromatic aberration whatsoever around the edges. It's awesome.

Me being me, I just had to try out this lens in "virtual tour terms" so I set it up on the nodal ninja and took an HDR scene inside the HPA Monlab. The results were slightly disappointing. My first try came out as some crazy psychedelic image, seen below.

Luigi Balbo and I were on the front page of the paper! Really cool. The article is about my work on the Imiloa Virtual Reality Project and Luigi's work on earthquake monitoring. Here is a link to the full article: http://westhawaiitoday.com/sections/news/local-news/passion-learning-hpa.html