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Ever since the Samsung Gear 360 was announced at MWC, I’ve wanted to try it out. I’m not one of those people who goes skydiving or mountain biking down the side of a cliff. So when MobileFun was nice enough to send me a Gear 360, I didn’t really know what to do with it. Then the light bulb went off.
I recently built a simple bird feeder to hang in a tree in my backyard. Birds love the thing. I thought it would be cool to put the Gear 360 inside the feeder and get some close-up views of the birds chowing down. The nice thing about the Gear 360 is the camera itself is small and it comes with a small tripod, so it fit perfectly inside the feeder.
The footage in the video is from around an hour’s worth of sitting and waiting. It took a while for the birds to get comfortable with the camera being there. Even when they did get more comfortable, it seemed like only one at a time would eat. When the camera isn’t in the feeder it’s common to see three or four birds on it at once.
There are a few problems with using the Gear 360 for something like this. I didn’t want to record one long video because it would have been a massive file. So instead, I sat nearby and pressed the record button when I saw birds getting close. The biggest problem I ran into was overheating. If the Gear 360 gets hot it will display a warning message and prevent you from recording video. The 90-degree heat did not cooperate.
So, the footage wasn’t as amazing as I was hoping, but it still goes to show how you can do some cool things with pocket-sized 360-degree cameras. It’s nice to be able to plop down a camera and not have to worry about where to point it. Even if you’re not recording a video, it’s pretty cool to essentially have a remote 3rd-eye that can put somewhere and look around. If only the birds weren’t so shy.
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