Fresh Eyes: The Savior Ball

When you need a new insight, you don’t ask your friends. You ask a stranger. When you need help because a hurricane just ravaged your city or a gunman may have hostages, you don’t ask your friends or strangers. Instead, you just toss in a rubber device the size of a softball.

What happens in emergencies

During times of emergency, restoring order to even a small, populated area is a lot of work. War and natural disasters like earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes or hurricanes do incredible amounts of damage. It’s not uncommon for urban areas to experience damages in the billions when things go wrong.

Damaged areas require lots of clean up. Dead and wounded are everywhere. All kinds of structures are compromised. Utilities are unavailable. Relief efforts require many resources; however, the best equipment is expensive and difficult to use quickly. That’s what one MIT graduate student thought, at least.

Francisco Aguilar

Francisco Aguilar was horrified as he watched news coverage of the post-earthquake damage that was prominent in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 2010. Thousands of people were buried under rubble. Only hundreds made it out. Relief workers fought hard, however, the results were unacceptable.

Though he was thousands of miles away from the relief efforts, Aguilar was able to see the problem with current emergency and relief technologies. Sure, there were imaging systems that could take great pictures of an area (providing valuable information for those organizing efforts), but they were huge. Bulky. Heavy. Plus, they could cost tens of thousands of dollars. He resolved to address the problem.

The idea

It wasn’t just relief workers who could benefit from a better system. First responders and soldiers frequently need information on the fly as well. However, to get when they needed, ultra-HD photography wasn’t required. What they needed was portability, affordability, and speed. The answer was obvious. Aguilar designed a camera after the most portable, cheapest and quickest thing that an average person could use: a ball.

Aguilar teamed up with David Young, a veteran of the U.S. Army and they developed a softball-sized device loaded up with cameras. They stabilized the cameras with rubber so they wouldn’t break on impact and installed a microprocessor to turn all the data into a single panoramic photograph of the area. That photograph loads up immediately to the thrower’s smartphone. CNN writers called it “The All-Seeing Eye.” The final cost for consumers was estimated to be between $200 and $500 – cheap enough that individuals could even buy them for fun if they wanted.

Improvements

As with any good innovator, Aguilar started asking questions. When he did, he got answers. Lots of them. Firefighters wanted detectors to sense a variety of gasses. Cops wanted audio. He promptly added the new features. The device, which he calls the Bounce Imaging Explorer doesn’t just see an area. For all relevant purposes, it can hear and smell it too.

The end result

When everything was said and done, Aguilar had won $60,000 in entrepreneurship competitions and developed a product that could sell for between $500 and $1000 apiece.

Though the price doubled from his original goal, there remains little reason why even local police forces and volunteer crews couldn’t be equipped with one of the devices.

Sometimes it takes a student to teach the experts.