Unseen areas are troublesome for police and first responders: Rooms can harbor dangerous gunmen, while collapsed buildings can conceal survivors.
Now Bounce Imaging, founded by an MIT alumnus, is giving officers and rescuers a safe glimpse into the unknown.
In July, the Boston-based startup will release its first line of tactical spheres, equipped with cameras and sensors, that can be tossed into potentially hazardous areas to instantly transmit panoramic images of those areas back to a smartphone.
“It basically gives a quick assessment of a dangerous situation,” says Bounce Imaging CEO Francisco Aguilar MBA ’12, who invented the device, called the Explorer.
Launched in 2012 with help from the MIT Venture Mentoring Service (VMS), Bounce Imaging will deploy 100 Explorers to police departments, with aims of branching out to first responders and other clients in the near future.
The softball-sized Explorer is covered in a thick rubber shell. Inside is a camera with six lenses, peeking out at different indented spots around the circumference, and LED lights. When activated, the camera snaps photos from all lenses, a few times every second. Software uploads these disparate images to a mobile device and stitches them together rapidly into full panoramic images. There are plans to add sensors for radiation, temperature, and carbon monoxide in future models.
For this first manufacturing run, the startup aims to gather feedback from police, who operate in what Aguilar calls a “reputation-heavy market.”
Over the years, media coverage has praised the Explorer, including in Wired, the BBC, NBC, Popular Science, and Time — which named the device one of the best inventions of 2012. Bounce Imaging also earned top prizes at the 2012 MassChallenge Competition and the 2013 MIT IDEAS Global Challenge.
The Explorer was initially developed for first responders. But after being swept up in a flurry of national and international attention from winning the $50,000 grand prize at the 2012 MassChallenge, Bounce Imaging started fielding numerous requests from police departments — which became its target market.
Months of rigorous testing with departments across New England led Bounce Imaging from a clunky prototype of the Explorer — “a Medusa of cables and wires in a 3D-printed shell that was nowhere near throwable,” — through about 20 further iterations.
Now Explorer is designed with a custom, six-lensed camera that pulls raw images from its lenses simultaneously into one processor. This reduces complexity and reduces the price tag of using six separate cameras.
The ball also serves as its own wireless hotspot, through Bounce Imaging’s network, that a mobile device uses to quickly grab those images — “because a burning building probably isn’t going to have Wi-Fi, but we still want … to work with a first responder’s existing smartphone”.
But the key innovation, is the image-stitching software. The software’s algorithms, vastly reduce computational load and work around noise and other image-quality problems. Because of this, it can stitch multiple images in a fraction of a second, compared with about one minute through other methods.
In fact, after the Explorer’s release, Bounce Imaging may option its image-stitching technology for drones, video games, movies, or smartphone technologies.
