View 360 Round footage here, from your computer: https://samsungvr.com/

Here’s a recommended video, Laguna Seca Raceway v10:

Watch the video to get an in depth look at how Rick Graves made the racing video and why the 360 Round was critical in making it possible.

What is the 360 Round VR Camera?

Until now, VR cameras have not been true 4K x 4K, have had limited environments where they can be used and have been too complex for mid and small sized content creators. With the 360 Round, now you can record, edit and stream complete VR video and audio, anywhere.

The 360 Round 3D VR camera features a total of 17 lenses in a stereoscopic 8-pair configuration with a single top-side lens to capture instant 360° horizontal and 350° vertical views from a single vantage point with no blind spots.

As a 360 live streaming camera, the 360 Round delivers real-time, fully immersive 3D live videos in 4K Ultra High Definition (4K x 4K) with minimal latency. Extra SDI card support enables you to capture from multiple cameras, alleviating the need for encoding or decoding during live streaming events.

It’s been an exciting decade for video and still-photography cameras, but if we were to sum 2017 up as anything, it would be the year that virtual reality (VR) cameras became accessible to a much broader “prosumer” and consumer market. Previously, filming footage in full 3D 360-degree VR was limited to those with deep pockets. VR cameras were the domain of movie studios and Silicon Valley startups hoping to define the new media. It required the funds of the super-rich, remaining wildly out of reach for office and home users.

But 2017 saw some significant changes on this front. Facebook introduced Surround 360, a family of VR cameras for licensing, not for sale, to partners to help get this technology into the hands of average Facebook users. At Humaneyes Technologies, we launched the Vuze VR Camera, the first consumer-focused VR video camera with a price below $1,000. The industry also saw the introduction of a middle tier, with Insta360 Pro hovering around $3,500 that allows for live streaming in full VR….[continue reading]

Click here to watch the video on YouTube

Kodak’s Pixpro 360 Orbit looks to simplify creating 360-degree video and photo content by handling all video and photo stitching in the camera, rather than having to do it yourself with post production software.

The next step is taking the experience to the living room, and, apparently, Google is not the only company interested. According to a note published by TechCrunch website May this year, Twitter, which had launched its service on Apple TV and other media platforms last Fall, updated the Apple TV app with the ability to watch live 360 videos. Twitter claims that their app is the first for Apple TV able to support live streaming 360 video.

Facebook has its Facebook 360 space, presented as “A stunning and captivating way for publishers and content creators to share immersive stories, places and experiences with their fans.” Facebook 360 offers two levels of immersion, 360 video and, for those willing to buy the hardware – Oculus Rift or Samsung Gear VR – , a “step even deeper inside a whole new world with Facebook 360. Surf the waves of Tahiti, step inside a blizzard in New York City or walk the catwalk in Milan by casting 360 video straight from your News Feed to your headset.”

While it’s still debatable whether virtual reality is going to be as mainstream as some wished, because of the cost of access to high-quality VR equipment, and the need to wear it to explore virtual worlds, 360 video seems a much more achievable goal, as it needs no specific gear and is easier to adapt to different platforms, from a portable smartphone or tablet to a living room dominated by a huge TV set.

Advertising is one area where companies are seeing a shift. Advertising company Vibrant Media introduced previously a vertical video ad format to North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific as part of its video portfolio, and Craig Gooding, founder and executive chairman of Vibrant Media noted that “in 2016, 43 per cent of our media agency buyers and planners bought vertical video ads. However, for 2017, 97 per cent of all our media agency buyers and planners expect more budget to be committed to vertical video.”

Notwithstanding the interest vertical video seems to have, Vibrant Media introduced immersive advertising with its 360° video format in February 2017. The company’s new study, “Media Planners and Buyers Insperience Survey” suggests that “67% of media planners and buyers want more VR and AR ads implemented into digital marketing campaigns, chiefly to increase consumer engagement but also to help curb ad blocking….

Click here to watch the video on YouTube

Will you be doing stitching in Mocha VR?

We looked at stitching, and we thought we had some interesting tools that could be applied. But I personally think stitching is something that will be covered more and more by the camera technology. We’ve seen it on the low-end consumer cameras — just a two-camera system as opposed to a six-camera system — but I don’t think stitching, over the long term, is going to be the biggest hurdle. One of our customers, Koncept VR, uses Mocha a little bit to fix the stitching. They’ll do a pass or two of stitching in GoPro Kolor, but say someone on screen is moving diagonally toward the camera. You’ll see them ghosting as they go across a stitch. This customer is doing a lot of rotoscoping in Mocha, and they’ll get a clean area from either side of the stitch from the original camera so they can rotoscope across it, replacing a person as they go across the stitch so it’s not as noticeable.

So the tools can clean up some artifacting after the stitching takes place.

Yeah. We didn’t design it for this purpose, but because Mocha is a workhorse VFX tool used for all kinds of clean-up, people are employing it to fix stitching.

The last thing to mention is that — and you brought this up earlier — a lot of the negatives in 360 are nausea-inducing experiences. When people have a bad first-time experience with a headset, they’re never going to want to put it back on. And a lot of filmmakers are moving the camera around on drones, on rigs, and on cars, so jittery footage can be a real problem. That was one of the big things customers told us when we were in beta. They were looking for new ways to stabilize. So we came up with something we call Horizon Stabilization. We use the planar tracker to track an area on the horizon. A lot of times things on the horizon are out of focus or occluded, and it takes advantage of the power of the planar tracker, so we might track some clouds or some area on the horizon. And then we stabilize the relationship between the horizon motion and the camera itself. It’s cool because in 360 you have access to all the pixels. In traditional stabilization you end up having to scale the image if you’ve locked something down. But in 360, we use the seamless pixels to stabilize the motion. We’ve had a lot of great feedback on this.

Click here to read the full article on StudioDaily

Where are We Headed?

It’s always good to understand the past when we see something that promises to take us into the future. Over the long term, the church has done fairly well with mass media and communications. Think about the origins of the printing press. Wasn’t Gutenberg’s intent to produce the Bible? We saw great preachers take to the airwaves at the advent of both radio and television. Since the early days of motion pictures, producers have brought Biblical images to the silver screen. Today, just about every church has a web site and most have a method of delivering sermons either by audio or video. While not usually on the bleeding edge, it is clear that the church has adopted technology in significant way.

One VR expert I spoke with from Nokia, says that VR today is just like movies of the past. When people first saw the film of a train coming at them, they would jump out of the way. That may seem comical in our culture. However it’s no different than when a person puts on VR headset for the first time, and ducks away from the images. That, too, will seem funny in a few decades.
This expert adds that we are not seeing the next jump in video technology, like SD to HD. He believes that 360 video is something totally different. In the same way theater is different from pictures and moving pictures is different from television. Perhaps, as VR progresses, our televisions will become like our radios today. We will simply use the screen as background, and VR will be the primary source of information and entertainment.

The leader in VR technology for the New York Times told me that they view their “Daily 360” as the next step in the photograph. Old newspapers came to life when photos were added. They see the VR pieces that they produce as the same jump in electronic news gathering. (An outstanding example of this in a short 360 documentary called “The Fight for Fallujah”. The Times sent a VR camera with one of their embedded reporters to Iraq and created a truly unique perspective on the conflict?)

Click here to read the full article from Church Production

Reel FX Shoots Shinola’s Stereoscopic 360 Video Tour ft. Luke Wilson

The latest from the VR team at Reel FX takes viewers on a 360-degree tour of Shinola‘s factory in Detroit, Michigan. Led by Luke Wilson, the tour offers an immersive perspective of the classic watch and bicycle manufacturer’s facility captured with 3D 360 video camera systems from 360RIZE and Nokia.

Covered by Adweek, VRScout and VRFocus, this project represents the latest example of a popular brand using VR and 360 video to tell its story. The 360 video footage offers an immersive perspective of various locations throughout the Shinola factory. Viewers see engineers in their element as they create Shinola’s latest products and enjoy Wilson’s satirical commentary throughout the piece. [Continue Reading…]