New Camera 'Ball' With 360-Degree View Could Save Police Lives

BOSTON (CBS) – It looks like a toy. But a "ball" could give police and emergency responders a lifesaving look into dangerous situations.

It's the size of a softball with multiple cameras and cutting edge technology.  And it's made in Massachusetts.

"What we're looking for is something that can basically get rid of the dark, scary spaces of the world.  That can keep people from having to go into a dark corner, a dark tunnel, an attic, where they can potentially get shot," says Francisco Aguilar, who came up with the idea when he saw emergency workers searching for survivors in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti in 2010.

That brainstorm led him and a team at Boston-based Bounce Imaging to develop the "Explorer."

"What we've got are six wide angle cameras that can capture images in all directions," says Aguilar.

Throw the ball into a room and those cameras create a 360-degree view that's sent to a smart device.  Then, you can scan the room.

"You can look around and you can see the different objects, you can see the layout of the room. We're trying to give police officers the view as if they were standing in the room. Keeps them safe. Keeps civilians safe," says Aguilar.

The Explorer is manufactured at Lightspeed Manufacturing in Haverhill.

While other devices can create panoramas, the big tech advancement here is the high speed the explorer stitches together all the images into a coherent whole.

"The stitching takes about .2 seconds," Aguilar says.

That means first responders can get the information they need, almost instantly.

"There are many times during the course of a day that an officer will be called to a dangerous situation," says WBZ-TV security analyst and former Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis. "Having an idea of what's happening inside a building can make the difference between life and death."

The first 100 Explorers are shipping now to police departments in California, Texas and Florida.

Here at home, the Revere Police Department has tested the units and is getting some new ones to use.

The price starts at $1,500, a fraction of the cost of the robots some big city police departments use. The device has won several invention awards from Time, CNN and Popular Science.

Aguilar says he hopes to have a consumer version in the future and also sees applications for virtual reality using the technology.