The H2
2009–2011: nobody understood 360° vision yet, so we built it into a Hummer H2. Three camera layers, four screens, its own power and live transmission, first shown at Intersec 2010.
By 2009 I had the patents, the prototype cameras and the software. What I did not have was anyone who understood what 360° vision could do for them. I tried to explain it to homeland security customers and saw polite faces. A 360° camera was an idea; nobody could picture it working on a patrol.
So we stopped explaining and built it. We took a Hummer H2 and turned it into a complete mobile surveillance vehicle: three layers of cameras, four touch screens, a computer rack, its own power and every way of sending video home. We showed it for the first time at Intersec 2010 in Dubai.
camera layers, from 0 to 1000 m
touch screens, four operators
running with the engine off
first shown at Intersec, Dubai
A periscope for 360°
The idea started in 2001. There were no small sensors then. Affordable cameras were DV camcorders, and even the first HD cinema cameras were massive bodies. Put two of them back to back and the lenses end up far apart, which ruins the stitch.
So I turned the cameras to face each other and put a prism and mirrors in the middle, the way a submarine periscope folds its light. It brought the two optical centres together and solved the back-focus distance. I built several versions, the XCam, the TCam and one with parallel tubes. Each one was expensive to build, because nobody had done it before.
A Hummer, rebuilt from the inside
The vehicle had to look the part and work every day. For the bodywork we worked with Bear Garcia, a custom car builder who had spent four years at West Coast Customs fabricating celebrity builds, and who starred on the Discovery Channel show Street Customs in 2007. The car was stripped, rebuilt, painted and fitted with a rack in the boot and screens in the cabin.
My kids came to see it in August 2009, when it was still in pieces.
See everything, then zoom on what matters
One camera cannot do everything, so the H2 carried three, each covering its own distance. The 360° camera watched the whole sphere around the car. The four panoramic cameras covered the middle distance. The PTZ reached out to a kilometre. Tap a point in the 360° view and the PTZ turns to it.
A control room on four wheels
Four touch screens let four people work at once, each with their own view of the same cameras: the driver, the front passenger and two in the back, plus a joystick. A rack in the boot held a computer built to run 24/7, GPS, a 3G router and Wi-Fi with a long-range antenna that reached more than 50 km, with a radio video link as an option. From the base, everything could be watched and controlled remotely over a secure connection.
The power was its own project: a second alternator, a capacitor, a marine battery, an inverter, a UPS and converters for 5, 12, 24 and 48 volts. The whole system could run for up to eight hours with the engine off.
One camera, many users, many views
We wrote the interface for touch, with big buttons for a moving car. Each operator could navigate the live 360° in single, dual, quad or panoramic mode while it was being recorded, switch day and night, steer the PTZ, follow the vehicle on a map and play back any recording, still fully navigable, with time and GPS position.
From Intersec to the streets of Dubai
After Intersec 2010 the H2 became our demonstration car. It drove through Dubai and showed in a few minutes what months of presentations could not. Rockwell Collins took an interest in what we had built, and I made many trips to Cedar Rapids to discuss integrating our 360° video with their own systems.
The H2 also opened the next door. In 2011, when I approached my friend David Craig at Atlantis The Palm to propose a proof of concept, the H2 is what I showed him and the Atlantis team. It made the idea real, and it led to the Sandance coverage.
One core, many applications
Once people had seen the H2, the conversations changed. The same cameras and software went into other forms: every kind of link (USB, FireWire, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, 3G and satellite), visible light and night vision, drones, an unmanned surface vehicle, cave inspection and pipe mapping. The rugged time-lapse camera was one of them; it filmed New Year’s Eve 2011 at Atlantis.
On the map for law enforcement
The H2 put us on the map for law enforcement. It opened the door to my involvement with Dubai Police, at the Dubai Police Academy’s International Centre for Security & Safety, where the security and safety training programmes were delivered with City & Guilds content and TAVCOM, the police’s partner at the time.
In 2012 my contribution to those programmes, which had passed 23,000 registrations since 2007, was recognised at the Dubai Police Academy with an Appreciation Certificate, an award from City & Guilds and the Dubai Police Golden Jubilee medal.
Before anyone knew what to do with it
In 2009 a 360° camera on a vehicle was something you had to explain. Today every IP camera maker, Axis, Mobotix and the others, sells a 180° fisheye model, and they pair it with a PTZ camera: the fisheye for situational awareness, the PTZ for the zoom. That is the H2.
I started on film cameras and lived the whole way to 2026, when anyone can buy a 360° camera in a shopping mall. The H2 was the moment the idea became a machine you could sit in.
Doo Technologies, Dubai, 2009–2011. Demonstration vehicle, first shown at Intersec 2010.
Concept, cameras, software and system design: Stéphane Jacob, with the Doo Technologies team. Bodywork with Bear Garcia.