Buying a new 360° camera for mapillary capture

Take a look at this thread about the YI360:
http://mapillary.trydiscourse.com/t/yi-360-vr-camera-review/2935

I am working on the “perfect workflow” to do what you are planing to do (I think). I am almost there… but there is a snag now that since the iOS update (to version 13) their app can no longer work with my iPhone.

When you are planing on doing it by car, do keep in mind the interval at which you are going to be able to take images!

When your camera can do one images per 2 seconds and want an ideal 2.5 meters between images your maximum speed is 18 km/h (speed: fast cycling) Driving a car will easily go to 50 km/h, resulting in 7 meters between images (upwards)… not ideal… When in “MP4 movie mode” one can have 24 frames (read: images) per second and drive up to a whopping 216 km/h and still have 2.5 meters between images!

I have built my processing software to handle MP4 files which creates JPG’s from the movie, match GPX (in sub seconds!) removes images when the distance between the previous is less then X meters, uses Hugin to do a (near) perfect stitch and a whole bunch of other stuff I ran across…

I am working on a project where I want to map my (rural) village (about 11km2) all in 360 images, ranging from road, cyling road to forest path. This year I have been working on “the perfect workflow”. Starting with getting the images as good as possible (ranging form good stitch work, image settings, best moment to take the images, setting it all up right every time, best GPS hardware, researching (dis)advantages of walking, cycling and going by car, etc etc) so that I can do the work next spring in a relatively short period and let the computer do most/all the work :wink: In the meantime I’m working on a platform where my neighbor (who has the village archive) can enter/process the village history… going to combine with public (geo) data etc. etc… to create an intuitive and interactive platform to unlock and show the village history (when my wife allows me to and the work for my own ICT company lets me :stuck_out_tongue: )

I think there is quite a bit of overlapping in our goals. In my decision making process I saw the three cameras you mentioned. In my opinion the YI360 is better, only the software and external GPS are the downsides I am working on (with that program I am creating). The insta360 pro cameras are definitely superior to all cameras mentioned. But quite a bit over budget for my project so I did not consider them. At what speed and quality can they record movies, or take images? (And do you need that extra quality?)

If you want we could call? Do keep in mind I’m Dutch (UTC+1) and you are also UTC+1 when I did my research correctly :wink: