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Facebook Surround 360: An Open 3D-360 video capture system
- aresant 11y ago360 video is cool but feels a little gimmicky for personal use. 180 degree 3D video, on the other hand, is AWESOME - that's the true-life look/feel that I think is going to be game changing and sell another 100m units for GoPro or whomever comes up with it. So far the players I know are: http://vuze.camera/ http://vuze.camera/ https://webeyevr.com/ https://webeyevr.com/ http://lucidcam.com/ http://lucidcam.com/ Or some combo of kit that you can cobble together: http://shop.gopro.com/accessories/3d-hero-system/AHD3D-001.html http://shop.gopro.com/accessories/3d-hero-system/AHD3D-001.h... Or run a DIY game: http://www.stereoscopynews.com/hotnews/3d-technology/software-a-hardware-tools/3493-a-vertical-3d-rig-for-360-3d-video.html http://www.stereoscopynews.com/hotnews/3d-technology/softwar... Anybody have any experience to share on a good consumer balanced solution?
- melvinmt 11y agoIs there a VR headset out there that already allows you to experience 3D?
- GrantS 11y agoYes, all of them. Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Google Cardboard, etc. They show a different view to each eye.
- soylentcola 11y agoDepends what you mean. 3D/360-degree? It's sort of doable using cameras and software to stitch and interpolate all the different angles but you're still viewing from a fixed perspective. That works in the current crop of VR headsets. Same with 3D/180-degree (or similar wide angle but not 360 3D stuff). I've watched several on my Rift dev unit. Getting into "real" 3D, like being able to view from any angle is trickier but there are experimental and in-development methods of doing this. The easiest works for CG stuff (just look at your 3D content in your headset). The more realistic it gets, the closer to a "movie" in 3D. Combining video footage with CG environments is a nice little "cheat" that's already been played with as well. But the real challenge and (as I see it) the ultimate goal in this space is being able to use something like multiple light field cameras or RGB+depth cameras (think Kinect) arrayed around a room or environment and capturing both live video and the 3-dimensional structure of the surroundings and any objects or people. The depth data from the various angles needs to be combined and "textured" with the video data in order to create something approaching a real 3D recording of something over time (so maybe they'll need to advertise as 4D movies). Even cooler is when you can compress all of this data and stream it over networks to be decoded on the other end. The result will be like 3D telepresence where you're all but transported to another location. Microsoft has been working along those lines and it makes sense since they have Kinect and Hololens. This is the sort of thing that will be the real "killer app" for VR/AR as far as I can guess: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0
- ryandamm 11y agoThe challenge, as you said, is the data compression. Well, that and optics; it's hard to grab all the photons someone might see if they moved around....
- alasano 11y agoI was already blown by seeing the Oculus conference in California in my GearVR (Next VR app). This is the type of technology which makes me dream about how good retirement will be one day.
- prbuckley 11y agoI own the ricoh theta s which is a $350 consumer 360 camera and love it. I take it to friends weddings and people lose their minds at how fun the 360 pictures are.
- GFischer 11y agoI think that if Ricoh makes a followup camera with better resolution, it should be HUGE. The current Theta and Theta S have already enabled a lot of people to "hack" with it :) https://codetricity.github.io/theta-s/ https://codetricity.github.io/theta-s/ The Theta S's quality is almost but not quite good enough for what I want to do, so I eagerly await the followup.
- makemoniesonlin 11y agowhoever /
- tantalor 11y agoHow does this compare to Jump for Cardboard & GoPro Odyssey from 8-10 months ago? https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/jump/ https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/jump/ https://gopro.com/odyssey https://gopro.com/odyssey https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9620224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9620224
- rsp1984 11y agoAs far as I understand this Odyssey is GoPro building the actual hardware and Google Jump is the software technology that powers it. In terms of goals, it's pretty much the same as Facebook's new camera. Other players in this space are Lytro [1] (they have pivoted away from consumer cameras to professional VR capture hardware) and Jaunt [2]. [1] https://www.lytro.com/immerge https://www.lytro.com/immerge [2] https://www.jauntvr.com/technology/ https://www.jauntvr.com/technology/
- eveningcoffee 11y agoWorks only if live feed is sent to FB servers. /s
- aresant 11y ago360 video is cool but feels a little gimmicky for personal use. 180 degree 3D video, on the other hand, is AWESOME - that's the true-life look/feel that I think is going to be game changing and sell another 100m units for GoPro or whomever comes up with it. So far the players I know are: http://vuze.camera/ http://vuze.camera/ https://webeyevr.com/ https://webeyevr.com/ http://lucidcam.com/ http://lucidcam.com/ Or some combo of kit that you can cobble together: http://shop.gopro.com/accessories/3d-hero-system/AHD3D-001.h.. http://shop.gopro.com/accessories/3d-hero-system/AHD3D-001.h.... Or run a DIY game: http://www.stereoscopynews.com/hotnews/3d-technology/softwar.. http://www.stereoscopynews.com/hotnews/3d-technology/softwar.... Anybody have any experience to share on a good consumer balanced solution?
- kmano8 11y agoI think they called out the target audience being pro applications. This is a great opportunity to give someone like the NHL/NCAA/etc ability to stream 360 to a facebook base.
- javipas 11y agoI guess that announcement makes sense for professional content producers, but this is mostly a clickbait product. One that we won't probably see in real life, although it's clear that VR has pushed interest for 360 videos. Good as an option, probably, but most of the time flat video is ideal. We'll see if that changes with these products or the ones made for big audiences (Samsung Gear 360, and LG Cam 360). I wouldn't bet my life on it. Adventure cameras have already reached their limits, it seems, for example, and I see a similar scenario on this case.
- tekromancr 11y agoI am not so sure. I once played around with projecting an imax 3d space movie on the inside of a virtual sphere. It was a pretty awesome accident, because (so long as I didn't turn around and look at the seam) I had the illusion of asteroids and stuff actually floating in my space. I think there is a lot of potential for 360-3D video. That said, I am not sure that content producers should focus too much on having things happening all around you. It's not great to constantly have to be looking all around, but it is useful to create the illusion of presence.
- algorithm314 11y agoWhy so many cameras?6 or 8 aren't enough?
- talmand 11y agoI would imagine the stitching required a good bit of overlap of a video with its neighboring videos.
- dfbrown 11y agoAlso for the 3d every direction needs to be visible by at least 2 cameras.
- ryandamm 11y agoYou need multiple cameras seeing every image point so your CV algorithms can have a good depth reconstruction -- and so it doesn't break if one camera has a lens flare. >2 viewpoints also helps with reconstruction ambiguities, etc. Google Jump uses ~16 cameras for the same reason.
- elif 11y agobased upon the photo-spheres i've made, the more pictures definitely help correct light-levels. Especially correcting areas looking at sun or glare.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- geekuillaume 11y agoI didn't find the link for all the specification about how to build one at home. Is it really open source ?
- cryptoz 11y agoIt is not open source. In the article, it says, > later this summer [Facebook] will put the hardware designs and video stitching algorithms on Github I do think it will be open source eventually, but it doesn't seem to be right now. We'll see.
- TD-Linux 11y agoHopefully it doesn't come with homegrown not-actually-free-software license that their other 3D video repos had. https://github.com/facebook/transform https://github.com/facebook/transform
- jamesfmilne 11y agoFacebook is the last company I would want to buy this from.
- HalcyonicStorm 11y agoCompletely agreed. Their bottom line is to collect all your personal information.
- askafriend 11y agoI feel like there's a group of people who have a list of these sentiments that they just copy and paste into any thread mentioning Facebook, adding absolutely no original thought or insight.
- melvinmt 11y agoWell, they don't actually sell it, so you're lucky.
- vernie 11y agoGreat news for Point Grey.
- danr4 11y agoEven though this is purely to fuel VR content creation for Oculus, at least the invention is in the public domain (pending OS license and patent grant)
- gautamb0 11y agoAgreed. Really looking forward to the stiching code being made available on GitHub. I wish that Google would at least release some kind of an API for their Cardboard Camera (e.g. allowing you to pass in a bunch of photos and get a stitched 360 out), but if Facebook makes good on this, it could be even better.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mdorazio 11y agoSomeone correct if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure they're using the Grasshopper3 camera, which retails for about $3k, and there are 14 of them in the pictured array. That's $42,000 just for the cameras. I know professional video shooting equipment is expensive, but that's more than double the price of a top of the line RED Epic-X camera that a professional 2d film crew might shoot on.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- aaronsnoswell 11y agoSo far as I can tell from the scant technical details, this isn't a true 3D 360deg video solution. It seems like this camera will provide stereo 360deg video for horizontally aligned left-right eye positions, which is not the same as 3D 360deg video that supports any head and eye poses (that requires full light field capture or reconstruction). This means any user viewing a video that rolls their head left or right several degrees will get a headache pretty fast. I'm sick of people claiming '3D' 360 video is the same as full 6DOF tracked VR - it is not. </high horse>
- mrfusion 11y agoHow does this compare with the theta https://theta360.com/en/ https://theta360.com/en/ It's much cheaper and available now.
- drcode 11y agoTheta isn't 3d, it's like looking at the world with one eye closed.
- skeletonjelly 11y agoMaybe a better analogy is that it's like listening to mono audio. Your analogy would be like putting one earbud in.
- mrfusion 11y agoI'd like to see something that takes a depth map with lidar and then actually lets you explore the photo.
- spiderfarmer 11y agoLidar isn't needed. Light rays themselves contain enough information to rebuild the scene.
- erikpukinskis 11y agoIt's hard for me to get excited about stereo 360 when we have light field capture coming soon. This feels like the era of 640x480 digital cameras... It's easy to see the potential, and the current gen is still valuable for niche uses, but it's clear the next generation is what will really deliver on the promise of immersive video.
- mrfusion 11y agoLight field capture coming soon? I'd like to learn more.
- dharma1 11y agohttps://www.lytro.com/immerge https://www.lytro.com/immerge Light fields are definitely the future but big challenges with huge data rates. I don't know how soon "soon" will be for consumer devices. OTOY is doing cool work with light field streaming
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- synotic 11y agoCheck out Lytro Cinema: http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/11/lytro-cinema-is-giving-filmmakers-400-gigabytes-per-second-of-creative-freedom/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/11/lytro-cinema-is-giving-film... https://www.lytro.com/cinema https://www.lytro.com/cinema
- infocollector 11y agoWhich cameras are they using. Is this pointgrey grasshopper3? Is there a cheaper way to do this well? :)