This company raised a million dollars to print 360º photographs onto spheres

Virtual reality might be the buzz of the town, but a new company called Scandy wants the world to know that the world of 360º content isn’t destined only for headsets.

Today, the company announced it’s raised one million dollars to start mass production on their ‘Scandy Spheres,’ a ball-shaped object that has a 360º image printed into them.

The process for creating the image and getting it printed is fairly straightforward. Use their proprietary app, capture a 360º scene of a particular location and submit the scene to be 3D-printed onto a Scandy Sphere.

For higher-quality images, users can also upload 360º panoramas captured with more heavy-duty camera rigs.

Their prints aren’t only limited to spheres, either. That’s just their specialty. Users can also upload 3D renderings of individual objects, which will be 3D-printed as individual models.

Below is a video of a Scandy Sphere being printed:

While it seems more novelty than anything else, the concept stands out to me. Throughout my childhood, I would often collect baseballs from various games I had been to or played in and display them on some sort of shelf in my room.

Imagine if you could do that with 360º views of your favorite places you’ve traveled to with family or friends. It’d be a museum of memories that capture the experience in a full 360º, rather than the limited range of a standard print (or even a panorama for that matter).