This is what 1% of my lifetime output looks like. If one is fortunate enough to get a productive lifespan of 50 years, spending 6 months on a project is 1% of it. Life is finite... you only get 100 6-month projects, that's it. Choose them well.
This purpose of this device can best be described as "scene capture", a photographic recording of a scene, including changes over time, with the highest practical fidelity: high resolution 3D panoramic time lapse. More information here.
Another way of thinking about this is that it creates gifts to the future: the ability to accurately see the past.
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I love old photographs, the more detailed and busy, the better. They are as close as it gets to time travel. This is the scene outside my front door, 121 years ago: it's the Old West for real - San Francisco 1891. Pretty fascinating. But the engineer/optimist in me wants better: it sure would be great to be able to zoom in to little details, look left and right, maybe hang out for an hour and see who goes by in what sort of conveyance, who goes into the store and what they come out with, and seeing it in color and 3D would be a big help.
Of course we can't do anything about the shortcomings of past photographic techniques, but we can create new ones with such features and use them to record scenes of our current environment. Then, in 10, 100, 1000 years, these photosets will be the gift of frozen time, preserved history.
That's what the "History Preserver" project is all about. The camera rig pictured above is the first finished part of the project. Next comes the viewing apparatus, then 2 non-trivial software components, one for file processing, one for playback. And then of course the actual photographic field work. It's a daunting project for one person without funding who has also to earn a living... full of sub-projects, sub-sub-projects and subtle gotchas. But despite occasional doubts and motivation difficulties, I believe it will eventually be worth the effort, especially in 121 years.
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