Why not 3D, in fact, if it had accelerometers and gyroscopes? Just throw it at around 45 degrees of elevation, capture photos during flight at a few fps, and post-process the results for a 3D scene reconstruction. (You'd have to design it much more durable for that mode of operation, of course.)
This is a nice idea -- the biggest practical problem would be motion blur while the cameras are in flight. If thrown straight up, there's a moment of zero motion at the top that mitigates that problem, but it's still an issue the rest of the time -- fast shutter speed helps but rolling shutter complicates it. Note that you could still get plenty of parallax for 3D from throwing straight up, just not right above and below the camera path, so that minimizes the durability problem from landing on the ground. It also provides a nice prior estimate (and additional constraints) on camera poses for structure from motion as the ball has to obey gravity.
Edit: On the indiegogo page they specify throwing is mostly for outdoor use: "While throwing works great outdoors during daylight, you can also use the camera indoors or in the dark when mounted on a stick or handheld." This would be due to the motion-blur/shutter-speed/sufficient-light problem.
This isn't really a new idea - the military already have versions of these that they can throw into a room or inclosed space to gain optics on it upon before entering it to clear it. They also have versions that can be launched over a longer distance via grenade launcher.
I thought I had seen it before. So it was patent pending in 2011, guess it takes a while in Germany too.
One of the downsides of the new Kickstarter/Indiegogo etc world is I keep seeing article on new "products" which don't exist yet. Interesting that the time to print time has shortened and now come inside the 'time to produce' margin. I think we need some backup words for these things, like "Possibly a new camera that can take panoramas"
Well to be fair, the camera exists, you just can't buy it yet. But perhaps it would be good to have some way of differentiating headlines about buyable products from prototypes/research projects etc.
Is it the really curvy bits at the bottom that bother you? You can fix it by using a different projection when rendering the spherical image to a flat surface.
The trouble is that the parts toward the bottom of the photo should really be beneath you! So you need an infinitely tall photo, or a screen that wraps around below your feet :)
the image quality leaves a bit to be desired... decoding raw images from sensor components is not a trivial thing. Hopefully the funding from indiegogo will go partly towards improving that.
The actual Indiegogo site: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/panono-panoramic-ball-came...