Kogeto Ships Dot, 360-Degree Panoramic Vid Camera for iPhone With a Twist

This is pretty wild: the Kogeto Dot ($80) is a 360-degree lens that snaps onto the back of an iPhone 4, shoots 360-degrees worth of video; then a player in the cloud (if you upload the clip) or on your iPhone 4 in the form of Kogeto’s free Looker app (if you keep the clip on your phone) allows you to play the app and change to any viewpoint in a 360-degree circle during playback.

Kogeto’s Dot camera began as a teacher’s aid, in the guise of a similar device named “Lucy,” before it moved on to become a Kickstarter project and has just begun shipping as a full-fledged product.

Right now, Dot only works on the 4, because the image stabilization feature in the 4S messes with Dot’s output — but Kogeto says they’re working on a solution.

Jeff Kogeto, the man behind the gadget, explained that the whole idea is to fix the problem of having to interrupt what you’re doing in order to capture footage. “They were always pointing the camera at the wrong place,” said Jeff when we spoke to him briefly over the phone. Now, instead, pretty much everything within a single plane can be captured and then different perpectives can be viewed later.

Jeff also mentioned that Kogeto is already speaking with CBS and the Canadian Broadcasting Company about using Dot for news interviews. Cool.

The clip above features David from Kogeto describing Dot; if you ‘d like to play around with actual footage, some fun uploads can be found here.

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