Throwable 360 cameras owe their heritage to Jonas Pfeil, who built one for his thesis at TU Berlin [0], and later commercialized the idea in a camera called Panono [1]. They never really went mainstream, but it was a really cool idea with lots of buzz back then (10+ years ago).

[0] https://www.jonaspfeil.de/ballcamera/ [1] https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/12/5092670/panono-camera-ba...