Police and first responders sometimes have problems when it comes to unforeseen areas. Sometimes, rooms can be where gunmen are hiding, and small pockets can be where survivors of a collapsed building are located.
These reasons are why Bounce Imaging has created a series of spheres with cameras that can simply be thrown into an area that might be hazardous in order to scope out the situation. The images of the area will be transmitted back to a smartphone.
Francisco Aguilar, who launched it with the help of MIT's Venture Mentoring Service or VMS, founded Bounce Imaging in 2012. The company will deploy 100 of its Explorers to different police departments around the country, and it hopes to offer the tech to first responders and others soon.
The device itself is covered by a rubber shell, which protects a camera with six lenses in total, each pointing in different directions. Once the device is activated, it takes photos from all six lenses and is able to capture a few photos per second. The device also acts as its own wireless hotspot through Bounce's own network, which is used to send the images to a smartphone. This is, of course, because of the fact that most places where the Explorer is going to be used — like burning buildings — probably won't have Wi-Fi.
In future models of the device, the company plans to add sensors for things like radiation and temperature. This future version will be designed and built after the company receives feedback from police departments.
Bounce Imaging has been praised by a number of media outlets, but it has also approached people who might have used the device. Army veteran David Young joined the project early on to provide the perspective of the end-user of the Explorer.
MIT's VMS was also a big part of the growth of the company, guiding it through funding and partnering, recruiting core engineers for the company and helping establish the first market for the company.
Aguilar himself first thought of the Explorer after the Haiti earthquake in 2010. He found out that international rescue teams were having trouble finding survivors in the rubble and were resorting to fiber-optic cameras, which are both difficult to maneuver and too expensive for widespread use. Once the Explorer was created and although it was first developed for first responders, after receiving a lot of media attention, it was fielding requests from numerous police departments, which became its target market.
