Although GoPro had their difficulties, they don’t give up from staying in the market. They have announced Fusion, a new spherical camera that captures photos, regular video and VR video at 5.2K resolution. GoPro plans to put the camera in sales this fall, but you can already apply for their pilot program which they will introduce this summer. If you’re impatient to see what it provides, they have released the video to show off Fusion’s capabilities.
Vimeo finally adds support for 360° videos up to 8K and a marketplace to sell your content
Yes, that’s right. Vimeo now finally supports 360° videos. Although YouTube has supported 360° videos for a while, many have criticised the low quality and high compression often shown. Even when uploading 4K 360° video to YouTube, the already degraded image loses so much more as a result. Facebook’s 360° video suffers from even higher compression rates and lower resolutions.
Vimeo has always been the place to go for hosting video if quality is your highest concern. And that seems to also hold true of 360° video from what I’ve seen of the samples posted so far. That’s probably thanks to its two-pass transcoding, which is almost always going to result in increased quality, even at the same bitrates.
TwoEyes VR – the first 3D camera that imitates human eyesight
Our eyes work together to see the depth and enable us to get the feeling of space. TwoEyes VR is the first binocular 360° VR 4K Camera that mirrors human eyesight. It allows you to shoot stunning 3D, 360° or Virtual Reality content with two pairs of lenses that imitate what you see with your eyes.
Meet D3-U, the first real-life camera that captures photos in virtual reality
It’s been a while since virtual reality has left sci-fi movies and became available to the masses. And now we can even take photos in virtual world. Design studio dotdotdash has introduced D3-U, the first camera of this kind.
Dotdotdash synchronized the announcement of the D3-U with the VIVE Tracker, which was announced at CES 2017. These two combined enable you to take photos in the virtual world, and even more than that.
Turn your DSLR into a 360 degree camera using only this special lens
Creating 360° videos involves lots of complicated settings, multiple memory cards, and you can’t go without stitching software. But the Sphere Pro lens is about to change it. Thanks to this lens, if you want to shoot full-spherical video, all you need to do is attach the lens onto your camera and start shooting. And judging from the video, the results are quite awesome.
VLC Media Player goes 360° for both photos and video
One of the most popular open source, multi-platform media player applications in the world has now added 360° photo and video support. This makes it the first major video player to add such support to the desktop. VLC’s developers, non-profit organisation, VideoLan, teamed up with Giroptic, a 360 HD Camera company to develop the technology.
The software plays 360 degree videos right out of the box, at the moment only for Windows and Mac. VLC 3.0 will merge the functionality onto each of the platforms on which VLC player is available. Which means Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android. YouTuber, Epoka e re posted up a sample of the software in action.
Nikon’s KeyMission360 beaten out by a $199 iPhone addon
Nikon’s KeyMission 360 camera landed with a fair bit of hype when it was first announced in January. A real camera manufacturer was getting into the 360° market. A company with a hundred years of photographic history. Then after delays in release due to earthquakes, the KeyMission 360 was re-announced, along with two more 80° and 170° cameras.
I got to see the KeyMission 360 in person twice this year, at The Photography Show in March, and at Photokina a couple of months ago, but they wouldn’t let us get our hands on them to try them out for ourselves. With all three cameras now out in the wild, the reviews are starting to come in. After watching this video review from iPhonedo, it’s not looking great for Nikon.
Canon’s new VR simulator lets you try out bodies and lenses before you buy
You’re not really getting to test out those bodies and lenses, of course, but it’s an evolution of the simulators already available on the web. They lets users see the different field of view at different focal lengths on different sized sensors. The simulators also allow you to see some real-time feedback on how the settings you choose will affect the shot.
Canon have now announced a new VR camera simulator for Oculus Rift. Such tools have been around on the web for a long time. VR does offer the advantage of slightly more realism, though. You can actually turn and look around the scene to find a composition you like. You can even teleport around the scene and see it from a different angle completely. That’s much better than the sets of pre-shot static images you see on web simulators.
Want to get into VR but don’t know what rig to buy? Watch this video
Virtual and augmented reality has become a big deal in the last couple of years. There’s a lot of different options out there now for shooting and streaming 360° content. If you want to get into VR content, though, it can be difficult to know where to begin. Most of the currently available solutions are quite expensive. The ones that aren’t may be inadequate for your needs.
This video from Pixvana walks us through the basic options. It helps us make decisions based on our own requirements. If you just want to stream to Facebook, for example, you don’t need a rig costing tens of thousands of dollars. On the other hand, if you want to make super detailed high resolution immersive content, you’re probably not going to manage it with a Theta.
Lytro takes us to the moon with first footage from their VR camera
We first mentioned Lytro’s Immerge virtual reality camera last year. Incorporating their light field technology at its core, it has a very unique appearance resembling something more suited to the set of a sci-fi movie. In the original concept video introducing us to Immerge, the demons shown were mockups.
Now, Lytro have released live action VR footage of the system working, and they’re taking us to the moon. One of the technologies that Lytro showed off with its cinema camera was keying out subjects without the need for a green screen. This is also being applied here to separate the foreground from the background.
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