Lens engineering for virtual reality

[grahas]

What type of lens/prism would be needed to allow a image sensor to see 180 degrees, so the sensor could see a hemisphere. It doesn't matter if the input is distorted. I thought that a glass pyramid with a square base might work.

 

[Drakkith]

How about a fisheye lens?

 

[berkeman]

What type of lens/prism would be needed to allow a image sensor to see 180 degrees, so the sensor could see a hemisphere. It doesn't matter if the input is distorted. I thought that a glass pyramid with a square base might work.

I did a Google Images search on 360 Degree Camera, and got lots of interesting hits. It looks like most of these systems use several lenses/cameras and stitch the images together:

https://www.google.com/search?site=....1.64.img..1.17.1049.0..0.PjUmcWAi6rw#imgrc=_

 

[Tom.G]

Google search for whole sky camera. Rather common devices in certain fields.

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=whole+sky+camera