3-D Pancam's big potential

Video cameras can do a lot today, but picture one that has such varied uses as entertainment, surveillance, facial recognition — even interior design — and you've pretty much got the Pancam — or Eric Prechtl's vision of it, anyway.

With enough seed investment, the founder and president of Axis Engineering Technologies says, he's six months away from producing a polished, three-dimensional, panoramic camera that can send video to a 3-D television. And with the right analytics partners, AET could develop later models with each of those other capabilities.

At MassChallenge, the startup accelerator and competition that's named his company a finalist, "We're analyzing different markets and trying to figure out what is the best one to go after first," he said.

As unlikely as it might seem, the 43-year-old Prechtl's quest to build a smarter camera actually grew out of his efforts more than a decade ago to build a smarter helicopter.

While he was working on his doctorate in aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he developed an actuator to reduce the amount of vibration in a helicopter, helping it to fly more smoothly and quietly.

"A similar thought process led us to figure out a way to make cameras smarter, including to make them see in 3-D instead of 2-D," Prechtl said.

He describes his working prototype as a "gnarly laboratory device," 24 inches in diameter, with six spokes, each with two cameras at the end.

Each camera, in turn, is capable of capturing 20 frames per second, "creating a panorama very fast."

Because human eyes are spaced only about 2.5 inches apart, the next-generation Pancam will be only 4 inches in diameter.

To adapt it for interior design and renovations, the next step would be to add software to map a still image of a room, Prechtl said.

The same camera could be used for surveillance to track suspicious movements, raising an alert should someone try to access a restricted area, he said.

And because the camera can see in three dimensions, it could be used by police, the FBI and the military for facial recognition because it could distinguish a person's features better than a traditional two-dimensional camera.

All of this technology doesn't come cheaply. Prechtl estimates the finished product, if it's sold commercially, would likely cost between $5,000 and $10,000.

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