First off, let me give you a little background on where I work. I work for a company called Contour and we make wearable POV HD cameras mainly for athletes and sports enthusiasts. You can see more about my company here. Not trying to advertise for them, simply want to lay the foundation for why this is so cool.
Part of my job is to work with sponsors (both athletes and production companies) to get them the video footage they need and us the material to promote our camera. Well, recently I was sent a video from a group of college students over in Spain that used our camera for a really neat project called the CHASAT II. The basic idea of their project is to send a big weather balloon 120,00 feet into the atmosphere to see the world from a POV perspective. They used 2 of our cameras for this project and came out with some pretty amazing footage. I wanted to share this with all of you. The video is a bit long (9 minutes from start to finish) but definitely worth watching. If you are impatient and want to just see the cameras in space, skip towards the last 3/4ths of the video.
That is a jaw-dropping video. Thats really cool that your cameras are used for such a fun project -- even cooler for the students to be able to put that on! The last bit where you see the arching horizon is flabbergasting.
How much do those cameras cost? I'm assuming they were not able to retrieve any of the used resources?
Wow what a nice view....amazing. That song that played in space is from Ocean's 11, at the end of the movie where they have all the money. Really cool stuff man.
On December 01 2010 09:52 denzelz wrote: That looks great! The lens began to ice up but the camera was still functioning. Must be a great recorder
Just wondering, what is your specific position at the company?
Seeing it is a small company still, I fill a few roles. However, my main role is working with sponsors and athletes. They refer to the role here as "Sponsorship Interaction Manager"
Odd role, yes I know. Still an amazingly wonderful company to work for though.
As for the footage, I don't actually know how they recovered the equipment quite yet. I'm in the process of trying to find that out. I will report back as soon as I know Cost of the camera they used is ~$300 a piece.
On December 01 2010 10:07 Sufficiency wrote: How did they transmit the video signal?
The videos are stored on to a MicroSD card so they were not transmitted. That makes this video even more amazing because they had to somehow get those cameras back to retrieve the footage
On December 01 2010 10:07 Sufficiency wrote: How did they transmit the video signal?
The videos are stored on to a MicroSD card so they were not transmitted. That makes this video even more amazing because they had to somehow get those cameras back to retrieve the footage
When the weather balloon goes high enough, the pressure drops, and the balloon expands. Eventually the balloon expands too much and pops, at which point the camera would fall back down to earth. Then you use your GPS to track where the camera landed. I've seen this done with a handicam and an iPhone (as the GPS) before.
"This video contains content from The Orchard Music and Sony Music Entertainment, one or more of whom have blocked it in your country on copyright grounds. "
Is there any other place than youtube where one can view this video?
On December 01 2010 10:48 nataziel wrote: When the weather balloon goes high enough, the pressure drops, and the balloon expands. Eventually the balloon expands too much and pops, at which point the camera would fall back down to earth. Then you use your GPS to track where the camera landed. I've seen this done with a handicam and an iPhone (as the GPS) before.
On December 01 2010 11:00 Sazchu wrote: "This video contains content from The Orchard Music and Sony Music Entertainment, one or more of whom have blocked it in your country on copyright grounds. "
Is there any other place than youtube where one can view this video?
Shit, I've seen that happen to one other user who was located overseas. I will see if I can get it up somewhere else for you
Amazing video, thanks for posting this. I'm also interested in the camera retrieval process, I wonder where it ended up falling lol. Specifically, what if it fell into water somewhere or something...that would have been crazy to try and retrieve.
They used an iPhone with some GPS app to retrieve the phone. IIRC the phone only traveled 30 or so miles from where it was sent off because of the winds.
On December 01 2010 10:48 nataziel wrote: When the weather balloon goes high enough, the pressure drops, and the balloon expands. Eventually the balloon expands too much and pops, at which point the camera would fall back down to earth. Then you use your GPS to track where the camera landed. I've seen this done with a handicam and an iPhone (as the GPS) before.
On December 01 2010 10:48 nataziel wrote: When the weather balloon goes high enough, the pressure drops, and the balloon expands. Eventually the balloon expands too much and pops, at which point the camera would fall back down to earth. Then you use your GPS to track where the camera landed. I've seen this done with a handicam and an iPhone (as the GPS) before.
Wouldn't the camera burn up like an asteroid?
The whole "burn on re-entry" thing would have been prevented by whatever mechanism they used to land the camera gently. Heck a "popped" balloon likely creates enough drag to prevent a terminal velocity high enough to cause burning.
Still very curious on how they reasonably reattained the camera. That sounds like the hardest part of the whole project!
Hey, this is cool. If I recall correctly, Day9 mentioned something similar on one of his daily. Now I have to get my VPN to actually watch the video on Youtube T_T.
And now for the mind=blown realization: from 9:00 on if you look carefully when the glare from the sun is shown, the ice + the glare + the lens make it look exactly llike the reflection of an Eye.
On December 01 2010 15:26 PrinceXizor wrote: And now for the mind=blown realization: from 9:00 on if you look carefully when the glare from the sun is shown, the ice + the glare + the lens make it look exactly llike the reflection of an Eye.
Haha, I never noticed that but wow that is pretty amazing. I will try rehosting this elsewhere for those of you who can't watch. Give me a day or two and I will put it up. Thanks for all the kind comments!
Just want to say your products are the SHIT! I love my Countour HD so much. The only thing I hate is that you had to come out with the Countour GPS 6 months after I bought the HD, and tracking is the one thing I am missing most :-( I to drop another 400 Euro on this :-(
Don't know if you can answer this, how well does the GPS track vertical speed? A lot of GPS seem to have problems with that from what I looked at so far.
Anyway love your products, keep making awesome stuff!
Aaaawww... Every time I see this kind of video (camera sent to space), I am sooo amazed... Its so damn beautiful!.. I think I might chose this video over some "two kittens massaging each other" video... and thats saying something!
EPT
They blocked it in Malaysia too. Could anyone donwload the video off youtube and upload it somewhere else/
![[image loading]](http://i34.photobucket.com/albums/d113/DJZapZ/smile.jpg)
