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[I]
Turn your iPhone 4 into a 360 degree VR video recorder with the Kogeto Dot[/I]

If you want my opinion (don't say that!) gadgets to let you use a huge DSLR lens with your iPhone are just plain silly. There are some much more sensible compact wide angle and fisheye lens adapters for smartphones out there but perhaps the most interesting smartphone lens adapter is the Kogeto Dot for the iPhone 4 or 4s and it's one of the photo hightlights at this week's CES show.

The Kogeto Dot is a hardware and software package that enables you to use your iPhone 4 as a 360 degree view video recorder. The hardware consists of a sleave and catadioptric 360 degree view lens, complete with anti-reflection coating, that fits over the iPhone camera lens. The design looks very neat.

The software is Kogeto's free Looker app and this not only handles the recording of clips but also links the resulting video to selected social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and also to Kogeto's own site where there is a dedicated area called Dot Spots where users' uploaded clips are featured.

When you watch a clip you can drag the view through 360 degrees as it's playing. It's weird but fun! Image quality is adequate rather stunning, but that hardly matters with the novelty of being able to move the view around as if you were there controlling the camera at the time the video was being recorded. You can find one example [URL="http://www.kogeto.com/dotspots/7XS2X2RMU6Y5"]here[/URL]. The [URL="http://kogeto.com/dotspots/"]Dot Spot clips index page[/URL] is well worth a visit.

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[I]The Kogeto Lucy S 360 degree video camera[/I]

The Kogeto Dot is priced reasonably affordably at $79. If that's too much of a toy for you, how about the Dot's big sister, the Lucy S ($999)? This is a complete 360 VR video camera that hooks up to a Windows PC.