Let’s do this!
This is the first post on our new blog about our Principle of Engineering project. Yay! We are planning on using Medium to keep track of our progress, share interesting and exciting updates, and document the work we have done.
Our project is tentatively titled ‘skycam’ currently. But that is going to change.
What is ‘skycam?’ Well, if you have ever watched a high-profile sporting event, like Sunday Night Football, you have probably watched footage of the SkyCam. It works like so:
The summary is this: A camera on a gimble is mounted on a cable suspension system, able of moving around and providing awesome, smooth footage from a various angles and levels.
Now, a similarly scoped project is clearly out of our skill level. But we searched the internet and found no hobby-level or amateur filmmaker version of this device. The only scaled-down version of a skycam for smaller venues was called CandyCam:
CandyCam launched a kickstarter that was never funded, and we haven’t heard much from this company over the last two years. Their product was still expensive, in the ~$20K range, out of the range of a hobbyist filmmaker.
More and more, high quality film-making is possible without overwhelmingly expensive equipment thanks to technology like GoPros and cheap drones. The problem is camera-holding drones is they are limited to outdoor use.
We believe there is space for a indoor, room-sized ‘skycam’ that is cheap (we have a $250 budget) and user friendly.
This much is clear:
- We have a great team of five determined Olin students with a wide range of skillsets.
- We have a vision for a product we believe there is a space for.
- We have about eight weeks to make it happen.
Bring it on!
