The new camera has the interesting name of Aware-2 and weighs about 100 pounds. If the weight does not deter you then you might want to consider its current size is over two feet on each side. This might make it a little hard to carry around with you. Aware-2 is also a little slow, this is no 32FPS EOS-1V HS, instead you have a 12-second shutter to image time (meaning it takes 12-second for the image to be recorded onto disk).

The way that Aware-2 works is like a shotgun; instead of one bullet you get multiple bullets coming out of the end of your gun. Here the Duke researchers put over around 100 14-megapixel sensors on a specially design dome. Each of these is designed to take an image that overlaps the others and when combined by the camera software creates a single image. The trick here is to make sure that each sensor is accurately focused across the area to be photographed. Again this is accomplished with the help of a computer that controls the camera and also is responsible for stitching all of the individual images into a single picture.

Aware-2 is also only capable of capturing pictures in black and white, but fear not. Duke is planning a 10-gigapixel color version by the end of 2012 with a 50-gigapixel to follow in 2013. As for when you can buy your own to take on your next outing? Well the technology of making all of this small enough and reliable enough for a handheld consumer version will probably not happen for the next 5-8 years. We are thinking about pre-ordering now…

Source Wall Street Journal

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