My ultimate goal is to set up some sort of digital strip camera rig for taking stereoscopic 360° panoramas.
I'd like to use a strip camera because it allows for fast panorama capture and theoretically by making more than one revolution you could make a stereo panoramic video, probably in time lapse (depending on how fast the strip camera is).
(General information on stereo pano photography is here: http://paulbourke.net/papers/vsmm2006/vsmm_talk.pdf)
However, the only options I've been able to find have been really expensive professional grade Photo Finish and panorama cameras, or phone camera apps (like ScanCamera on iOS) which are limited to 30 lines per second or less, meaning a low resolution (1024px wide) panorama would take 34 seconds to capture.
It's theoretically possible to capture a strip photography panorama using one 2D camera if it's set back a ways by taking a vertical strip of pixels from either side of the camera image.
After quite a bit of research I'm fairly certain there's no way to increase a phone camera's framerate enough to be usable for this. I don't have any hardware hacking experience, but I do have good high level programming skills.
Ideally such a system should ideally be able to capture at least 200 lines per second, and should cost less than $500. Film photography (such as the "Spinner 360" camera) is not a good option.
