The quality of smartphone cameras can be amazing. If you want a professional panorama, you don’t need to schlep pro-equipment around. If you know what you’re doing, you can rely on your smartphone camera – or plenty of them.

To make that point, Sony just launched a promotion for their Xperia Z5 Compact: They claim they shot the world’s first 48K panorama 360° video.

Sony PR staff mounted twelve smartphones on a 3D printed rig. Each camera was filming simultaneously in 4K.

Then they started capturing panorama scenes from the slopes: freestylers performing tricks in the park, high-speed racers on a slalom course and the stunning panorama looking out across some of the Alp’s best known peaks.

The footage from each phone was painstakingly stitched together to create a 360-degree panorama video. If you have latest version of Chrome or Firefox installed, you can pan the video around – just use your mouse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=tbHMd91omxM

Sure, you can argue that the resolution itself doesn’t add up to 48 K when playing it on your screen. But, nevertheless, the result looks amazing.

This is how the design for the 3D printed rig looked like.

Unfortunately, Sony didn’t release the build files yet.