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Jump – Experiences like you're actually there
- javert 11y agoAlmost impossible to read that font on my machine. edit: I'm on Linux/Firefox. I assume it has to do with what font sets I have installed.
- buckbova 11y agoYeah, not sure why it has font weight of 100.
- wtallis 11y agoIf you're going to make that kind of complaint, you really should at least mention what you're using to view the page.
- javert 11y agoI agree. Edited my comment.
- artursapek 11y agoPeople who have retina screens tend to forget that most of the world still doesn't have retina screens.
- _stephan 11y agoI suppose you're talking about the "Roboto" font in #737373. It's also hard to read with Chrome on Windows 7 and a standard 1920x1200 monitor. The same thing happened when Google Fi launched. Either they don't test enough on certain platforms or it's just that corporate design takes precedence over good readability on certain platforms.
- rullgrus 11y agoI guess that it is a "Firefox issue". I have the same problem with Firefox under Windows 7 (2560x1440, newly calibrated screen). The font renders a little better in Chrome and in IE 11 it looks good.
- diminish 11y agoDid anyone see this coming? Quite a successful secret by Google.
- nijiko 11y agoyes, vihart has been working on it for a while: http://elevr.com/elevrant-camera-circles-for-stereo-spherical-video/ http://elevr.com/elevrant-camera-circles-for-stereo-spherica...
- krick 11y agoI don't understand why this comment is so heavily downvoted. I also was surprised how any information about google working on something like this has never appeared in my view.
- diminish 11y agoThis was the 2nd comment here at the beginning. Maybe there's tendency to downvote sibling comments? Also in the first version I had a grammar mistake. I wrote "Did anyone saw this coming?"
- relet 11y agoNext up: Street View 3D?
- hsuresh 11y agoI used to think VR was mostly for gaming, but with this, and expeditions that they demoed, I'm starting to get really excited about VR apps for the masses.
- piyush_soni 11y agoThat'll be awesome! Walking on any street of the world, just as if you were there? Why not!
- toomuchtodo 11y agoYou'll need some fancy ML/CV algos to take photo-only data from this to turn it into 3D environments, but Google could already create Street View in 3D with their self driving car data their collecting using their cloud point laser scanners.
- corysama 11y agohttps://gigaom.com/2014/12/18/google-maps-for-android-has-a-vr-mode-thanks-to-google-cardboard/ https://gigaom.com/2014/12/18/google-maps-for-android-has-a-...
- xrjn 11y agoIt appears that someone has already done something like this [0]. In 2013 during 30C3 in Hamburg, someone bought in a bicycle which you used to bike through cities virtually using an Oculus rift [1]. Unfortunately I couldn't find any extra information about that project, but I do seem to remember that they had to cache everything locally because Google blocked them after 10000 API calls a day. [0] https://github.com/troffmo5/OculusStreetView https://github.com/troffmo5/OculusStreetView [1] https://instagram.com/p/ibU1IXFhCz/ https://instagram.com/p/ibU1IXFhCz/
- SunShiranui 11y agoHow does it do stereoscopy?
- adityasankar 11y agoProbably with some simple optical flow view morphing. There's enough data from all the cameras to enable creating a stereo image.
- georgemcbay 11y agoThere is definitely overlap in the FOV of the cameras that are adjacent to each other (GoPros in 16:9 generally have about a 120 degree field of view, though specifics depend upon which GoPro models is being used), so I assume they timesync the individual videos and use that overlap information to determine relative depths of things.
- DINKDINK 11y agoIn order to do Stereoscopy properly, you need the axes of the camera barrel to intersect having a set of cameras all radially pointed outward doesn't achieve this.
- GrantS 11y agoThe end user never sees the raw video in this case so that's not a requirement -- they're generating lots of synthetic stereoscopic views for the user by post-processing the video and accounting for depth. I'll be interested to see what data they're sending to the video player to provide both stereoscopy and 360-panoramic video at the same time. The methods I can think of offhand require real-time pixel-shuffling to assemble the proper view during playback but maybe they figured out something else.
- saluk 11y agoI'm guessing it's planes all the way down.
- deleted 11y ago
- julianpye 11y agoThe interesting aspect here is the iPhone availability for Cardboard and the use of Youtube as the platform for 3D VR. Youtube already had stereoscopic support, but there were not many clients available, content was limited and difficult to create with 3rd party solutions that all cost money. It never took off and couldn't ride the wave of the studio and CE company driven 3D momentum, which quieted down after a while anyway. This time Google ticks all the right boxes. Client devices on iOs and Android. The videoplayer everyone uses. A $5 cardboard enabler. A capture platform with GoPro and free assembly software.
- pimlottc 11y agoI'm looking forward to trying out Cardboard on iOS. Anyone have a recommendation for a good viewer manufacturer? (I'm a bit surprised at how much some of the kits are, given they're made of, er, cardboard).
- prbuckley 11y agoI am a bit partial as I am one of the founders of this company but here is a shameless plug for our vr viewers... http://www.dodocase.com/collections/virtual-reality http://www.dodocase.com/collections/virtual-reality
- rgoodwintx 11y agoThanks for the shameless plug :) I like that you called out the material quality/selection in your viewer. I'm actually kind of fascinated at the level of guidance Google gives to help partners make these. Anyway, pre-ordered and look forward to it! (iPhone 6)
- jsprogrammer 11y agoGoPro is a third party solution that costs money (a lot). What makes it different from before?
- julianpye 11y ago
- adityasankar 11y ago16 GoPros? Sounds expensive. Certainly not something I would buy, since it would gather dust on the shelves along with my other gadgets after a few initial uses. That being said, this may be the right time to reinvest in 360 degree stereoscopic video since the viewing technology is finally catching up. Point Grey has been making similar spherical cameras since the 90's [1] Pretty cool idea overall. Other questions I had: Does it have a single data interface? How do you charge this behemoth. [1] http://www.ptgrey.com/360-degree-spherical-camera-systems http://www.ptgrey.com/360-degree-spherical-camera-systems
- schooldistrict 11y agoxiaomi's sports camera is about $70, gopro's cost is about the same I guess
- citruspi 11y ago> gopro's cost is about the same I guess The GoPro Hero4 costs $400.
- teraflop 11y agoBut the GoPro Hero is only $130 and is physically the same size.
- imaginenore 11y agoThe first GoPro is garbage. I have one, and I have the 3+ one. The first one is noisy, has horrible compression, absolutely horrible at low light, doesn't shoot 4K, doesn't do 60fps at 1080p.
- Domenic_S 11y ago> The first GoPro is garbage [...] doesn't shoot 4K, doesn't do 60fps at 1080p. Truly we live in the future. If you told me even 15 years ago these would be legitimate complaints for a sub-$200 camera I would have called you crazy.
- elevensies 11y agoHas anyone though through doing this with binocular vision in all directions? just thinking about the geometry, I can't thing of a way to do it without a truly egregious amount of sensors.
- evan_ 11y agoI wonder if you couldn't just display the same video to each eye, offset by 10 degrees or so.
- swalsh 11y agoSo, if you're at an event or something (like sxsw) do you wear this as a hat? or have a large pole... or how does filming with this actually work?
- jonknee 11y agoMounted on a tripod like any other camera system. Most people will view the content, few will record (16 cameras is a lot of money/hassle/data).
- drcross 11y agoI guess you havnt used a GearVR yet then.
- jonknee 11y agoGearVR is a VR viewer and this is a VR capture system, two different things. Hardware wise it competes with some indie brackets that similarly fit an array of GoPro cameras: http://www.video-stitch.com/camera-360/ http://www.video-stitch.com/camera-360/ All mount to a tripod. GoPro is even coming out with their own: http://gopro.com/news/nick-woodman-talks-virtual-reality-and-drones http://gopro.com/news/nick-woodman-talks-virtual-reality-and... The clever part here is the software.
- ipsin 11y agoLooking at the picture immediately makes me think of it as an oversized crown or tiara you're supposed to wear on your head. Sort of a "Glass 3.0". The "Camera Crown" is an entirely impractical idea of course (that is, not the actual idea), but that does lead me to wonder how it's meant to be moved through spaces, if at all.
- froo 11y agoI expect these will be probably hard mounted to moving surfaces during sporting events. The event that comes to mind is obviously motor racing, specifically Nascar. I think being able to experience crashes in 3D stereoscopic would be a big selling point for people.
- schooldistrict 11y agoso, based on the first image, I need to press 16 buttons to start capturing, and take 16 sd cards out before I can view them?
- uptown 11y agoGoPro cameras can communicate over wifi, so probably not.
- schooldistrict 11y agomy hero 3 drains its battery super fast when on wifi
- jonknee 11y ago> "GoPro's Jump-ready 360 camera array uses HERO4 camera modules and allows all 16 cameras to act as one. It makes camera syncing easy, and includes features like shared settings and frame-level synchronization" No more details than that, but GoPros have an accessory port in the back that makes it possible to control and I'd assume they're using that. You can even supply power through this port so in theory you could add expansion battery packs to this rig and keep the cameras charged.
- jclarkcom 11y agoGoPro's can be controlled by a separate remote control (http://shop.gopro.com/accessories/smart-remote/ARMTE-002.html http://shop.gopro.com/accessories/smart-remote/ARMTE-002.htm...) which can signal up to 50 cameras at the same time. You can also access SD cards via USB without needing to remove them (as well as supply power). So google could do all this with no hardware mods to the cameras. From my test, GoPro's remote typically syncs cameras in under 5ms but sometimes it can be longer. Having a time offset between cameras can be dealt with in software in many cases.
- timeu 11y agothis might just "jump start" VR (pornos) Ok sorry couldn't let this word pun slip :-p
- Yhippa 11y agoI wonder if this is what gets VR to take off. Seems like Oculus will be way too expensive for practical use. Once people start getting content out there all you'll need is a $20 cardboard kit to take advantage of that. You could have several of these say at a music festival hanging around and watch them from your house at your leisure without having to deal with heat and crowds. And worse you go see an artist on one stage and realize they're a dud and you have to now travel to another stage. With this, boom, you can switch in an instant.
- peter303 11y agoVR has been "around the corner" for 30 years. At some point Moore's law will give enough resolution and speed that images will seem real. I thought Oculus had reached that point, but I havent seen a demo yet. Wait a little longer and off the shelf solutions approach that point too.
- fixermark 11y agoThe big risk to the 3D / VR market is generally the possibility that there is a percentage of the population that just isn't "wired" for it, i.e. they can't actually experience immersive 3D without physical revulsion from their sensory experiences not lining up. When you start designing a product for only N% of possible consumers, you're in trouble if N isn't large enough.
- shostack 11y agoThis is actually my biggest fear. I am counting the days till the commercial release of the Rift and haven't tried any of the units yet. I got motion sickness from Mirror's Edge in < 5min. and have difficulty playing other games in tight indoor spaces or games I can't crank the FOV up on. If we finally get awesome, immersive technology, and I have a genetic trait that makes me unable to use it without getting ill, I will be truly depressed. This level of VR immersion will allow a whole new range of sensory experiences and I want to be a part of that from the beginning.
- jannes 11y ago
- devindotcom 11y agoI love all the experimentation in this area but I'm afraid systems like this are going to fall into a sort of uncanny valley of VR. Your brain is incredibly good at picking out the discrepancies between the real world and a high-resolution 120fps image with surround sound - just as it is incredibly good at recognizing objects and motions masquerading as human. It's like going from 2D/24FPS to 3D/48FPS. You'd think it would be a huge increase in perceived realism but it's quite the opposite. What you want is magic window, which is what you get when a film or even a game really pulls you in and your perception sort of synchronizes with something completely out of step with your physiology and totally unbelievable for many other reasons. Instead, you get a feeling of unreality or surreality, and the final gap between the media and your perception is unbridgeable. I think that's part of why VR/3D/HFR stuff has always been so unconvincing, and why it's no coincidence that it's finally only catching on when we pair it with totally unrealistic games and demos. You need the fantasy. Because it's so clearly not reality, and anything that attempts to replicate reality too closely will be rejected. Anyway, cool tech though, and I'm sure I'll enjoy using it some day. But for now I think the foreseeable future of VR is in virtual environments, not in the duplication or capture of real ones.
- jonknee 11y agoI think the reason VR is better with games and demos is because it's hard to properly record in the real world. That's what Google is trying to solve here and I expect the results are far ahead of current solutions. It's both using a lot of hardware and a lot of software, I'm very excited to check out the results!
- adityasankar 11y agoI think that's a slightly pessimistic view. This experimentation is what will eventually enable the bridging of the uncanny valley. And I think that day will be here sooner than we think.
- andrewparker 11y agoYou're talking about Presense, which is the point at which your brain flips and is convinced what its seeing is real. Michael Abrash has a wonderful deck he wrote while at Valve about what it will take for VR to create Presense in the viewer. It's worth a read if you care about how we'll navigate past the uncanny valley of VR you describe: http://media.steampowered.com/apps/abrashblog/Abrash%20Dev%20Days%202014.pdf http://media.steampowered.com/apps/abrashblog/Abrash%20Dev%2...
- soggypretzels 11y agoI had a book of chindogu from at least 10 years ago. They had an invention that looked shockingly like the jump camera. Here is an image which shows a scan of a few of the images including the relivent one: http://www.tofugu.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/chindogu-unuseless.jpg http://www.tofugu.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/chindogu-un... I find it kind of funny that Google is now using a system that was invented so long ago as a joke. Why not use any of the other system to capture 360 3d images? Why did Google decide 16 cameras was the right way to go? The only reason I can think is you might get higher res images out of 16 cameras than with only a few and a hemispherical reflector or a motor, but is it really worth the extra cost and points of failure?
- fixermark 11y agoIt's not for capturing 3D images. It's for capturing 3D movies, which can then be stitched together and viewed immersively. There's similar technology used in "Circle 360" theaters in Disneyworld (EPCOT) and other places, but the cost has generally been in the content-production side of things. Cost is still in the content-production side, but by basing it on commercial off-the-shelf components, they're bringing it closer to the masses.
- untog 11y agoLooks great, though as other commenters have pointed out, 16 GoPros makes for an expensive rig. I've been watching this space for a while and pretty much all of the consumer varieties (usually Kickstarter-backed) have pretty terrible video quality, so it looks like I'll be sitting this one out for a while yet.
- wanderingstan 11y agoThey don't claim this to be a consumer product. As others have said, the cost of this is peanuts compared to professional cameras. I'd bet one of the first killer-apps for VR will be sports: Imagine several of these rigs set up around (and over) a football field, so that spectators can choose to "be" at the right point on the field to observe the game, and have complete freedom to look around the field.
- aggie 11y agoI think you'd be surprised how nice it is to have a team of producers and camera operators doing the work of finding the interesting views for you. People attend live sports for the atmosphere and shared experience, not the view.
- jonknee 11y agoThough a court side camera at a basketball game would make an interesting vantage point... People definitely do sit court side for the view.
- bigiain 11y agoThat's true - but for my preferred sport (motorcycle racing) sometimes it'd be _really_ nice to not have to "settle" for the producers choices of what to see (that last MotoGP race had, from memory, 3 critical overtaking manoeuvres happen while the producer had decided to cut away to showing the team/girlfriend in the pit garage). We don't have the bandwidth (yet), but I dream of the day when there's a cluster of camera arrays (similar to that 16 GoPro rig) at every on track vantage point (the current camera locations would be fine to start with), with a few hundred video streams coming out of the race track and the option to use whatever smart software you can buy/subscribe-to/write, or even maybe get a curated feed from someone other than the on-track producer. The World Superbike Championship telecast is already using some pretty good image processing software to paint real-time telemtery overlays onto a bike in the video feed - it's still making mistakes, but it's pretty impressively good considering it's happening honest-to-god-live. (I can't find any public videos to link to there, sorry - Dorna are obviously really good about sending takedown notices to Youtube, and all the good video on their own site is behind their paywall...)
- prbuckley 11y agoThere are a couple of consumer ready 360 camera options available to purchase today ($300-$400), albeit not 3d steroscopic. I have personally played with the ricoh theta and the kodak pixpro and think they are good products. Here are some links if you want to check them out, I don't work for any of these companies but am a VR enthusiast... Good for stills and video https://theta360.com/en/about/theta/ https://theta360.com/en/about/theta/ Action camera similar to GoPro http://kodakpixpro.com/Americas/cameras/activeCam/sp360.php http://kodakpixpro.com/Americas/cameras/activeCam/sp360.php http://www.vsnmobil.com/products/v360 http://www.vsnmobil.com/products/v360
- seanherron 11y agoWasn't this invented by Disney in the 50s? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle-Vision_360%C2%B0 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle-Vision_360%C2%B0
- TheGRS 11y agoI was just thinking about how the idea has been around a long time. Even back in the early 2000s I was working on a project that used a camera on a special tripod that would let you take pictures in 360 degrees and stitch them together with some software in post (quicktime I think?). But I think the neat thing is using readily-available GoPro cameras and stitching the video together quickly. That takes a lot of processing power to do on the fly.
- steveax 11y agoQuickTimeVR Toolkit. It was painfully slow on my Quadra and the stitching usually had to manually corrected by nudging the images around (didn't help that this was pre-digital cameras and errors in slide registration and scanning compounded) but I thought it was close to magic - even if it was running in MPW ;-)
- bd 11y agoSomething that's maybe not clear from that page, but was mentioned in the Google IO keynote: this is not just stitching of multiple video streams. Google does some heavy-duty machine learning / computer vision on their servers to extract 3D information from these video streams (they mentioned having depth data). Then they presumably re-generate seamless stereoscopic 360-degree video from this 3D model. That's how they can get stereo from mono data. It's something like those hyperlapse videos from Microsoft, they also first do number crunching on lot of video data to generate 3D model and then use this to fill in missing data.
- waynecochran 11y agoYes. I wrote the code for the http://www.3d-4u.com http://www.3d-4u.com 3D camera. You definitely can not use simple still image stitching algorithms. Per pixel depth estimation (via dense stereo matching) and subsequent blending must be used. I would say more, but I had to sign a long NDA before I worked on this.
- joering2 11y agoThis looks like 180, not 360.
- waynecochran 11y agoYep -- same seam issues though.
- sebastianavina 11y agoi was expecting the cube to get solved once the page finished loading.. I'm dissapointer
- josu 11y ago> get stereo from mono data Why do you call it mono data? Given how close are each lense from another, I'm guessing, that anything far enough (0.5m?) from the cameras is beign recorded by at least two cameras at all times.
- tobr 11y ago> Our 3D alignment approach creates a beautiful, seamless panorama, so you you won't see borders where cameras are spliced together. Ironic how there's a seam in this sentence.
- sohilv 11y agoIts similar to Samsung's Project Beyond.
- nathan_f77 11y agoThis is really exciting. I came up with the same design last year and have been really wanting to make a rig like this. My gym had treadmills with screens, and you could select a virtual hike through places like Oregon and New Zealand. So I really want to capture some of these hikes with this rig, and replay them while walking or running on an Omni [1]. I'm really excited about the potential for VR to turn exercise into an enjoyable experience, instead of a chore. And one day I would love to travel around the world with a team and film a documentary like Samsara. [2] [1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1944625487/omni-move-naturally-in-your-favorite-game https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1944625487/omni-move-na... [2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0770802/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0770802/
- proee 11y agoHas anyone see the opposite of this done - where you have a 360 degree array of cameras pointed at a target? This would allow the viewer to pan around the point of interest during an action sequence. I'd like to see an array of cameras using quadcopters flying around a target - say a whale jumping out of the water or a football player. This would allow the viewer to see all side of the action. Great for sports playbacks.
- usaphp 11y agoI don't think a quadcopter can hold cameras with enought distance apart from each other in order for a shot to be any useful, I mean think about it, whale jumping or a football players bodies are much bigger then a quadcopter radius, so the 360 views will most probably be useless
- codeonfire 11y agoThat was the Matrix bullet time shot.
- Buge 11y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibwTDmxsXuI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibwTDmxsXuI
- outericky 11y ago360Fly has a single 360 camera (shipping this year). Much more consumer friendly but similar concept. https://360fly.com/ https://360fly.com/
- etcet 11y agoI'm curious how they are planning to record audio. Binaural sound can give a sense of presence even without video. The common approach to recording it is by placing microphones in your own or a fake heads ears and that won't work in VR. It'd be interesting to see an array of microphone elements perhaps in a cleverly shaped mold to go along with this.
- nathan_f77 11y agoEach of those 16 GoPros have microphones, so I think you could get great results by processing all of those audio signals.
- aaroninsf 11y agoThe best idea-0 approach would be to record Ambisonics with a tetrahedral array, and ship B format or a derivative to the client. In theory that could be processed just-in-time to produce an appropriate stereo image based on head tracking. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambisonics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambisonics In practice the computational overhead would likely be on par with graphics processing and you might want an APU :)
- gdilla 11y agoI wonder how the vertical FOV is - will you be able to look up and look straight down? Seems like this is optimized for horizontal 360.
- jdeisenberg 11y agoThen there's this: https://www.panono.com/#/en/home https://www.panono.com/#/en/home
- bigtones 11y agoThis rig does stereoscopic shots from two different perspectives at once, which the Panono does not. That's just a flat still shot camera(s).
- harigov 11y agoIf they can do it in real-time, this can replace the LIDAR used in self-driving cars, which can reduce the cost and make them affordable.
- hyperion2010 11y agoLIDAR will almost always be a better option when you don't have particulate matter that obstructs the beam because you can measure the distances directly which vastly reduces latency. Round trip time to a remote server means you have already lost and also introduced some very nasty failure modes. This is the reason why valve uses a LIDAR like system for Lighthouse rather than try to do image processing like on the kinect.
- drcross 11y agoImagine with high enough bandwidth where you could outsource the cost of a taxi to remote operators like drone pilots.
- Istof 11y agoMaybe they could write white on white and then it would finally be completely unreadable, nice design as usual Google
- ZainRiz 11y agoIs it April 1st already?
- prbuckley 11y agoI think LightField camera technology is ultimatly going to win the VR camera wars, it provides much better depth information. If you havn't seen the otoy tech yet it is worth checking out... http://home.otoy.com/otoy-demonstrates-first-ever-light-field-capture-for-vr/ http://home.otoy.com/otoy-demonstrates-first-ever-light-fiel...
- greendestiny 11y agoLightfields don't lose because of how they look, it's the lack of compression and difficulty in capturing them for real scenes that have held them back.
- badsock 11y agoThe apartment scene on the linked page was about 40MB compressed, IIRC. True that was a static scene, and admittedly once you start doing 30 FPS (perhaps no need for 90+ FPS that the HMD's require, because head movement can be rendered independantly of animation), you're up to 70GB/minute. Lots, for sure, but not out of the question.
- greendestiny 11y agoIt's not out of the question, but it's back to distribution by physical media and the only unequivocal technical advantage is in the rendering of reflections and refractions.
- barbs 11y agoDid anyone else immediately think of this? http://digital--underground.tripod.com/id9.htm http://digital--underground.tripod.com/id9.htm
- polymathist 11y agoThe most realistic virtual reality I have ever participated in was the Duke immersive Virtual Environment (DiVE). There is a program that simulates a kitchen. There are cereal boxes, silverware, etc that you can pick up and even throw across the room. When I opened the refrigerator door, I instinctively moved my body out of the way. The crazy thing is that it's not even the best tech out there. The resolution was crappy and the physics were a little bit off. But if you stopped actively paying attention to the details, even for just a moment, it was enough to make some part of your brain think it's real. VR doesn't have to much better (if at all) in order to be really immersive. If you're at Duke or somewhere nearby I highly recommend checking it out. They have visiting hours fairly frequently. http://virtualreality.duke.edu/ http://virtualreality.duke.edu/
- jonahx 11y agoHow did it compare to Oculus Rift? I've never experienced either but I'm curious....
- polymathist 11y agoI've tried the Oculus DK1 but not the DK2. They are similar in terms of resolution and tracking accuracy. There are two main differences. The DiVE is a cube-shaped room with six projected walls. So you can fit multiple people into the simulation at once (only one person gets head tracking and the proper perspective). The DiVE also had a "wand" which you could use to interact with your environment. I would bet there are similar peripherals for use with an Oculus Rift, but I haven't tried them.
- sohilv 11y agoSamsung project beyond is compitetor
- sohilv 11y agoSamsung project beyond is competitor
- a-dub 11y agoThis is a really fun hack that really did make me smile and laugh... but I do wonder what the sensor/processing/display latency is like on hardware/software that wasn't originally designed to do this. I once played with an early Oculus, it basically amounted to something that wasn't really succeeding at tricking my senses other than giving me a headache and making me want to vomit at the same time. I'm sure similar things were said about early cinema though.
- tw04 11y agoLooking at the top comments - I guess I'm completely crazy. I 100% thought this was a late April's fools. They legitimately think people are going to buy a 3D printed (~$12 hat), that holds about $5k worth of gopros? So... this is like another Nexus Q/really smart guy's horrible idea that's just going to disappear with no explanation?
- ddingus 11y agoMaybe they would given some basic incentive. Free internet, some discount, gift card? I wouldn't underestimate what some people will do for a little spiff. Maybe they won't do it again, but they might do it once, or on occasion. If one could manage churn reasonably? Who knows? That said, not on your life. Not doing it.
- Cthulhu_ 11y agoAnd why not? It's not about the hardware - it's about the videos they can create with a simple tool (and a few thousand to buy the cameras), which puts this technology within reach of the semi-professionals and higher-end hobbyists, instead of specialized equipment in Google Streetview cars. Like how Cardboard gives simple VR to anyone with a smartphone. It's not about whether it's a killer app, it's about planting the idea into people's minds - and eventually, about creating content. Because that's Google's trade - content. Cool 3D videos = more views than a regular gopro video = more advertising income.
- WorldWideWayne 11y agoIf my assumption is correct that Google has a monopoly on search and user-published video, then your argument seems illogical to me. They're already getting almost 100% of the available pie, so where would the growth come from? Even if there is room to grow - how much extra money do you think will actually come from this venture and why? No, this product seems like bullshit which is designed to keep nerds talking about the Google brand. It's a flashy, go-nowhere project that nobody is going to use. I'll bet you $100 that people generally do not remember it a year from now.
- tempodox 11y agoFar out, this is a nice experiment. I wonder, though, how viewers will be able to focus on something that close without additional lenses.
- w__m 11y agowooow, multi-billion-dollar-megacorporation striped together 16 expensive cameras with a piece of plastic :OO so what, actually. They find ways to continue maximizing profit from their commercial platform. Which was at its most-cool when it was community-mostly.