ARE YOU READY FOR SOME SPYBALL?

DefenseTech ^ | April 20, 2004 | Noah Schactman

[billorites]

Evil doers: if a soldier tosses what seems to be a rubber tennis ball into your secret hideaway, he does not want to play a set of doubles. He wants to spy on you.

An Israeli start-up has put together a spherical sensor, packed with 360-degree cameras and microphones, that can see and hear everything in a 25-meter radius, and send the pictures and sounds back to HQ.

The omni-directional images could give "field commanders... a front-row seat inside terrorist lairs," Defense News says. "If hostages are involved, rescuers may be able to communicate discreetly with captives via microphones and speakers implanted in the devices."

O.D.F. Optronics calls its orb -- surprise, surprise -- Eyeball. And prototypes of the little guy have already been ordered by the Pentagon and by Israeli forces.

"All the electronics inside are floating, and will be housed in three layers of rubber, which serve as shock absorbers," O.D.F. chief Ehud Gal tells Defense News. "You can throw it, or shoot it from a specially equipped sniper’s rifle, and it can stick to the wall or start transmitting as soon as it stabilizes."

With Eyeball's specially designed reflective lens, "everything is in focus and you have an unlimited depth of field," Gal adds.

"The raw image transmitted by the omni-directional lens has a distorted shape." But a couple of algorithms chew up the footage, and spit back out a scene we people can understand. Game, set, match.

[billorites]

Just a matter of time before these start rolling through the girl's locker room.

[discostu]

Will it bounce? This has great sport potential, the fact that they said it's tennisball sized gave me ideas.

[Professional Engineer]

PING

[cd jones]

someone (maybe you) posted this link to 'Metal Storm', a new proposed weapon system.

check out the videos

http://www.metalstorm.com/

[msdrby]

cool gadget

[Psycho_Bunny]

Happy Fun Ball's Big Brother.

[billorites]

[JOAT]

Reminiscent of the hovering spyball in 'They Live' or the little crawler spiders in 'Minority Report.'

[SAMWolf]

I can see some potential for this commercially. ;-)

[Darksheare]

COOL!
Too bad it doesn't blow up after bouncing about.
(Of course.. I'd also probably throw a coupe superballs in with it to cause major confusion. Anyone ever see about ten superballs bounce all over the place? Gat's one's attention...)