I recently bought a
Ricoh Theta, a specialistic camera that has TWO fisheye lenses on two sides of the device, and produces 360 degree pictures in one shot.
The pictures that come out look quite crazy, for when normal fisheye isn't quite crazy enough. I've made pictures like the one below by stitching together multiple fisheye shots in the past, but it's a lot of work, this device does it all in one shot.
There are downsides: it tries to find an exposure that works all directions, so if there's any strong light/dark varience anywhere, you'll get washed out / too dark lighting etc. There's no preview, so it is hit and miss what you get. Combine that with what is sure to be a crappy sensor and image re-projection, and image quality is often borderline unusable.
Also, if you hand-hold it, you'll have some gigantic fingers in the picture (which I cropped out in all pictures). You can put it on a tripod and activate it from your phone for better results.
But I don't care because I love the way it looks:
These two pictures come from the same shot. The first one is the way it comes "raw" from the camera (it turns the two spherical fisheye shots into an equirectangular projection), with a strip at the top cropped off that had my fat fingers in it. The second one is re-projected to be more like a traditional fisheye shot (stereographic), though notice it has >180 degrees of view and it doesn't have any circular borders (a circular fisheye would have a circle inset about 10% from edges of this photo, a "full frame" fisheye would only be able to capture a rectangle inside that circle).
Here's a few more:
In the last one, notice from the shadows that we're actually standing across from eachother, looking at eachother :)
