MacBreak Weekly – Alex Lindsay re-picks the Gymbl Pro and shows the Gymbl Pano prototype

Posted by Gordon on March 28, 2012 Leave a comment

I visited TWiT in Petaluma last weekend to fulfill an earlier offer to Alex Lindsay and Leo LaPorte to create virtual tours of their new studios using the Gymbl.

Leo may complain about the cost, but their new studios truly are impressive and you’re left with the impression there really is something “new” going on here.

To capture the tours, I took along a prototype of our new Gymbl Pano adapter that we developed to create professional-quality virtual tours with the iPhone 4 and 4S. You can do this with any Gymbl but it takes a lot of attention and is tedious. As you might expect, Alex asked to play with it for a week and yesterday unveiled it to the MacBreak Weekly community.

Below are the Virtual Tours that I did. Leo was busy doing his radio show so I couldn’t do his office, something I hope that Alex does while he has the prototype.

I suggest after you click on the tour that you run it “FULLSCREEN” to see the detail as you zoom and pan. They look just as good on the iPad.

TWiT Studio

TWiT Command Center

Sooo….. Here’s what I can tell you about the new Gymbl Pano:

We’ll have the product details up on our website later this week
You will be able to pre-order the Gymbl Pano as a Reward on our KickStarter Project. If the project doesn’t get fully funded then we will contact you about fulfilling it directly from our on-line store.

Key features include:

The pan and tilt rotors are on the axes of the camera to eliminate parallax.
It has physical detents on both the pan and tilt plains for assuring the optimum 25% overlap of images.
A full spherical panorama is created from the 32 images (3 rows of 10 images plus the zenith and nadir images).
It supports 3/8″x16tpi tripod mounting and has a thread adapter for 1/4″x20tpi tripods.
It includes a bubble spirit level for quick set up.
The long bracket arm has a number of 3/8″ and 1/4″ threaded holes functioning as a truss to attach other accessories such as microphones and lamps.

Construction: