8K video gives virtual reality the full picture for mainstream use Over the last six months, 360-degree videos have become A Thing. Google added support in YouTube, Facebook followed, and now we see a cavalcade of announcements from device manufacturers, all wanting a slice of the next revolution in photography. It’s easy to understand why: immersive video provides a feeling of ‘being there’ …
Thrilling isn't it. Like you I now have an S5 mini with a not quite so outdated and vulnerable OS as it had. Only took Samsung 14 months. It still doesn't have the only new Android feature I actually give a crap about - selective permissions. There is nothing of value in 5 so far as I can see. Oh and a feature I rely on daily is now unreliable - alarms.
You sure ? Sort of assumed it was 3D all around from the article comment "so when you stretch that out in both directions (width and height) over an entire sphere, a high resolution image becomes very sparse and grainy."
Also looking at the picture (which unhelpfully cuts off at the cameras themselves - but I'm assuming given the likely height of the transparent domes the light receiving business end is above the cutoff and is something along the lines of the digital equivalent of a fisheye lens approach ), there's only two cameras so I'm assuming they effectively take a hemisphere each.
OK, I'm jealous.
I've got a samsung gear VR and oculus rift.
And I shoot immersive videos with gopros just now (usually of me paramotoring over mountains, etc).
I'm waiting for a reasonably priced 360x180 4k camera to get more immersive.
At present, I find with gopro I can pull out 4k to 170 horizontal x 120 vertical and get good results.
I've been waiting for the nikon 360 key mission, but it's been put back to 3rd or 4th quarter now :-(
imho it's the future of VR (well 3d 8k 360x180 probably). It gets around the need for the supercomputer to power the graphics, etc and gives you a truly new experience.
I think we will see 'movies' soon that start to make sense of it.. but it needs real thought - it's back the square one with every cinematographer rule of the last 100 years to work out what works.
I have just had it confirmed that the Gear 360 Manager app is not available for the S6. Only the S7 compatible version is currently available to download in the Play Store or via Galaxy Apps.
Samsung have said S6 users will be able to download the app in the next few working days.
Just as an FYI, I bought myself a "360fly" as a birthday present, which is basically half of this thing (one fisheye lens) but it's actually available in the US. One good feature is it's waterproof and another is that the Android app is surprisingly quite good. It's even got a mode where you can use the app with a Google Cardboard VR viewer in real-time.
I have the HD one instead of the 4K one, but it's still pretty good resolution and $100 cheaper.
The only downside is you have to convert from fisheye to equirectangular with their Windows program (about an hour for 10 minutes of video on a Windows Virtualbox VM) and then YouTube can handle it as a pannable 360 video. I haven't yet found a free & decent Linux conversion program for video (there are tons for images)
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