The RayShaper BeeHive works on principles of computational photography/videography… something your smartphone already does but on a much bigger, more powerful scale.

A winner of the Red Dot Product Design Award, the RayShaper BeeHive is trying to reinvent professional photography/cinematography by borrowing a clever trick from the most popular camera in the world – the one in your pocket. You see, as smartphones were struggling to compete over who could build a bigger, better camera, someone figured out that the secret to better photography was to just introduce multiple cameras. Famously, the iPhone X’s dual-lens setup kickstarted the trend of using two cameras to handle the workload of one single powerful camera. One lens captured color detail, the other focused on black and white detail, and working just like the rods and cones in your eyes do, both those photos were composited together to make one single image that was vastly better than what a single camera lens could do. In fact, two lenses could help the smartphone identify depth too, allowing the iPhone to click ‘Portrait Mode’ photos – a trend that really picked up back in 2017.

RayShaper’s cameras follow the same principle. Their unique hexagonal shape allows you to create a ‘honeycomb’ of multiple cameras snapped together. This array has two main benefits – firstly, the slightly offset cameras allow you to capture a wider shot without using a wider lens, and while provide spatial resolutions of over 1 billion pixels at 120fps. Secondly, the offset cameras allow you to capture depth information too, and even perform spatial recordings with 6 degrees-of-freedom (6 DoF) that are necessary for VR headsets. “Compared with ultra-high-resolution and light field camera systems currently on the market that use legacy architectures, BeeHive provides higher performance at a much cheaper cost”, say the folks at RayShaper. The modules allow you to add or subtract lenses on the fly, and give you the power to build up your camera setup without necessarily needing to upgrade by buying the newest cameras. Just add a few more modules and you’ve got a camera rig that’s much more powerful!

The RayShaper BeeHive is a winner of the Red Dot Product Design Award for the year 2020.