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To me, the circular video format is an amazing new feature. Now no longer you need to worry about how you hold your phone, and your friends can view it in any f

To me, the circular video format is an amazing new feature. Now no longer you need to worry about how you hold your phone, and your friends can view it in any fashion they'd like to. I wonder if they built a proprietary video codec for this or whether they were able to adapt an existing one to circular content. Also, people are used to spending hundreds of dollars on nice sunglasses, it is clever to go after that spending. $150 for sunglasses merged with a gopro is amazing. I'm not a big snapchat user but I respect them very much for shipping this product.

pjc50 9y ago
Most codecs will compress a round vignette of a square video extremely well.
untog 9y ago
It's just a normal video, warped. Someone already made an iOS module that'll replicate what the app does: https://github.com/gizmosachin/Monocle https://github.com/gizmosachin/Monocle
- bflesch 9y ago
  Thank you for the pointer. It was very interesting to go through the repo.
- nakedrobot2 9y ago
  it's not warped. a camera lens is round, it makes a circular image. here that circle is smaller than the sensor. all they're doing is wasting 1/2 the sensor's pixels :)
  - adrianmonk 9y ago
    If they can get a square (rather than rectangular) sensor, and if my math is right, it's a lot less than half.. A circle has an area of pir^2. And it fits just inside a square whose sides are length 2r, and whose area is thus (2r)^2 or 4r^2. Therefore, the circle fills pi/4 of the square. So only 21.5% of the pixels are wasted. It gets worse if they use a rectangular sensor, though. With a 4:3 rectangular sensor, it's 41.1% wasted. For 3:2, it's 47.6%. And for 16:9, it's 55.8% wasted.
  - true_religion 9y ago
    The linked app is just a video player. It plays videos shot with the spectacles. It does not seem to record.
tlrobinson 9y ago
Does it detect orientation and automatically rotate so it’s level? If not it might as well just be square,
- baby 9y ago
  check the video, it does.
some_random 9y ago
>To me, the circular video format is an amazing new feature. Is it though? Within the app maybe, but what if you want to pull the video off and say, post it to youtube? Outside of the snapchat walled garden, a round video will look absurd. >$150 for sunglasses merged with a gopro is amazing. It's not a gopro, it doesn't have (real) HD, it records round videos, and can only record for a maximum of 30 seconds. I cannot think of any overlap in use-case between this and a gopro.

pjc50 9y ago

Most codecs will compress a round vignette of a square video extremely well.

untog 9y ago

It's just a normal video, warped. Someone already made an iOS module that'll replicate what the app does: https://github.com/gizmosachin/Monocle https://github.com/gizmosachin/Monocle

bflesch 9y ago
Thank you for the pointer. It was very interesting to go through the repo.
nakedrobot2 9y ago
it's not warped. a camera lens is round, it makes a circular image. here that circle is smaller than the sensor. all they're doing is wasting 1/2 the sensor's pixels :)
- adrianmonk 9y ago
  If they can get a square (rather than rectangular) sensor, and if my math is right, it's a lot less than half.. A circle has an area of pir^2. And it fits just inside a square whose sides are length 2r, and whose area is thus (2r)^2 or 4r^2. Therefore, the circle fills pi/4 of the square. So only 21.5% of the pixels are wasted. It gets worse if they use a rectangular sensor, though. With a 4:3 rectangular sensor, it's 41.1% wasted. For 3:2, it's 47.6%. And for 16:9, it's 55.8% wasted.
- true_religion 9y ago
  The linked app is just a video player. It plays videos shot with the spectacles. It does not seem to record.

tlrobinson 9y ago

Does it detect orientation and automatically rotate so it’s level? If not it might as well just be square,

baby 9y ago
check the video, it does.

some_random 9y ago

>To me, the circular video format is an amazing new feature. Is it though? Within the app maybe, but what if you want to pull the video off and say, post it to youtube? Outside of the snapchat walled garden, a round video will look absurd. >$150 for sunglasses merged with a gopro is amazing. It's not a gopro, it doesn't have (real) HD, it records round videos, and can only record for a maximum of 30 seconds. I cannot think of any overlap in use-case between this and a gopro.