I'm most interested in how they'll bring the price down though, since development of this product doesn't look cheap.
It looks like this would need to be priced similar to a disposable item. It's safe to assume that these ball cameras won't be retrieved even remotely as often as they're thrown -- imagine firefighters stopping on their way out of a burning building to retrieve their ball camera -- so the best way to convince potential customers to buy en masse would of course be to price them low enough that losing a bunch of the cameras won't be considered throwing money away.
I'm really curious what that price point would be in order to still turn a profit.
Well compared to the cost to train a new firefighter or cop the could cost $1000 each, all be thrown away, and make a profit if the person using the used less than say 200 in a 10 year span.
The calculus is if you Know that there are no one in a room in a fire you don't go in there and risk injury or death. One, one week stay in the hospital is about $105,000 ($15,000 a day) so they can be "expensive" and cheap at the same time. The parts will set them back maybe $35 per ball. And since they aren't mil spec they don't have to be enemy jamming resistant or able to withstand being shot.
There's no way I'm going to trust a single ball thrown into a room to give me a complete picture of where any victims might be...
In a residential setting (where the _vast_ majority of fire related injury and deaths occur, both civilian and firefighter), rooms are small enough that searching them isn't likely to be any slower than tossing the ball in and evaluating the image. Additionally, victims (especially children) like to hide (under beds, in closets, etc). I suspect this camera would have a tough time spotting them
A single static image of a room isn't going to terribly useful. Assuming you're using infrared sensors (if you're not, it's entirely useless), it can be surprisingly difficult to distinguish the heat signature of a victim from other objects in the room if you don't have a dynamic image you can look at for a few seconds.
I'm most interested in how they'll bring the price down though, since development of this product doesn't look cheap.
It looks like this would need to be priced similar to a disposable item. It's safe to assume that these ball cameras won't be retrieved even remotely as often as they're thrown -- imagine firefighters stopping on their way out of a burning building to retrieve their ball camera -- so the best way to convince potential customers to buy en masse would of course be to price them low enough that losing a bunch of the cameras won't be considered throwing money away.
I'm really curious what that price point would be in order to still turn a profit.