Facebook has spent a lot of money on virtual reality with its $2 billion acquisition of headset-maker Oculus. Now the social media giant just has to make sure there’s enough VR content out there to justify that investment.
At Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference on Tuesday, the company announced a 17-camera array for capturing 360-degree 3D video called Surround 360. Looking something like a flying saucer, the camera has 14 wide-angle cameras around the side, two on the bottom and a fish-eye camera on top. Facebook used off-the-shelf components for a price tag that comes to $30,000. The company is also building the software to stitch together the multiple cameras to view in VR.
Facebook doesn’t want to build this themselves, so it’s open sourcing both the hardware and software. It’s hoping developers will pick up the hardware design to do something with it. The open-source designs won’t be up on Github until this summer.
Facebook is aiming the hardware at professional filmmakers.
Facebook is joining an early and messy market for capturing 360-degree video. A plethora of startups and established tech giants have announced their own solutions for capturing this kind of content. In 2015, Google and GoPro launched Odyssey, a $15,000 16-camera rig for making 360-degree videos. Google handles the video stitching with a cloud service it calls Jump. In 2014, Samsung announced Project Beyond, a professional-grade camera, and then this year, it announced Gear 360, a handheld camera for capturing 3D content aimed at the consumer market. And last year, Nokia announced Ozo, a $60,000 professional camera.
On the startup side you’ll find players like Jaunt and Lytro, who are both focused on putting together hardware and software tools for professionals to make VR content. Lytro is especially interesting on a technical level with a camera that captures the actual light fields in an environment. The camera will record at 40k resolution and 300 frames per second. That will amount to as much as 400 gigabytes per second of data it’s taking in. Just renting the Lytro hardware-software package will start at $125,000.
But many of these projects still aren’t for sale yet, and Facebook said the systems that are currently available simply aren’t good enough yet. That’s what led the company to creating Surround 360. ”In most cases, the cameras in these systems would overheat, the rigs weren’t sturdy enough to mount to production gear, and the stitching would take a prohibitively long time because it had to be done by hand,” wrote Brian Cabral, director of engineering at Facebook in a blog post on the new camera system.
With all these systems for capturing 360-video coming online, it’s clear there will be no shortage of options for how to film VR content. Everybody seems desperate to create enough VR content before consumers arrive. The next big question is whether or not consumers will ever arrive.
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