If you are anything like us, last time you went bowling, you thought more about how the ball came back to you than actually knocking down the pin. Perhaps you even wondered what it would be like to be a bowling ball making its way back through mysterious and hidden machines. [Wren] and [Erik Beck] did as well, so they set out to make a bowling ball camera to find out.
At the heart of the contraption is an Insta360 X5 camera nestled between water-jet cut metal plates. Because each lens of the camera has a 200 degree field of view, anything in the overlap of the two lenses simply does not appear, so the two metal plates likewise, do not appear. This does leave a somewhat noticeable seam down the middle of the footage, but overall worked out very well. To prevent vibrations in the bowling ball, it can only be rolled along the plate line, making said seam appear in all the footage. Because the stabilization is happening purely digitally, and the camera itself is spinning with the ball, motion blur became an issue immediately. Fortunately increasing the shutter speed fixed the issue, along with an increase in ISO to compensate for the decreased exposure.
The outer shell was made of two acrylic or polycarbonate domes, with the former providing better optics, and the latter better strength. Unfortunately, clear half-domes can only be formed in certain sizes, and the closest to the standard bowling ball size of 8.5 inches was 8 inches. This led to many challenges come filming, resulting in neither the pin-side pickup nor the bowler side pickup being able to grip the ball. The pin side was solved using a simple foot, but the bowler side proved more challenging. After many attempts with cardboard shimming, the team finally just gave it a push with a regular sized bowling ball pushed in afterward.
The footage turned out brilliantly, and we would love to see a V2 of a correct diameter. Now, this is not the first time we have covered strange bowling engineering, make sure to read this piece on pins with strings next!