Facebook announces Surround 360 Camera. At the F8 developer conference, Facebook shows a new camera that can record depth information in addition to video data. Surround 360 Camera is an important milestone for the virtual reality industry.
Surround 360 Camera Specifications
The design of the new camera Surround 360 Camera has a hardware on the surround 360 hardware. That is an open source 360 camera. The new technology comes from Facebook the past summer. Now Facebook provides software and design plans, and interested developers that can assemble and modify the device at their own expense.
In the past few months, Facebook has also been working on this same modification with the technology company Otoy, which specializes in the construction of light fields. The new models have 24 or six cameras and are called “Surround 360 Open Edition”.
What’s new in Surround 360 Camera?
In addition to video data, they are now able to record spatial information. With Surround 360 Camera the spatial information is available per image. And it is extracted and estimated using a special positioning of the lenses in combination with a software. So special 3D depth cameras are not needed to be installed separately.
Depth Measuring hardware
Surround 360 Camera results are videos. Which no longer stick like a photo-wallpaper on the head of the VR-spectacle wearer. But they are shifted with exact perspective of actual depth. Similar to rendered VR worlds, the user has so much more freedom for movement in the depth of the room. The following GIF illustrates this.
So it is great freedom for movement. So we do not know exactly how much depth it can consider. However by analysis on the volume of the camera and the GIF, we can estimate that the head and upper body are free to move. But more deep video walks are not possible with this camera. Probably the smaller ball with six cameras offers a little less freedom of movement than the variant with 24 lenses.
Announcement Details
The recording of such spatial videos is quite new, among other things Lytro or Intel also experiment with it. What’s new in this technology is, however, that Facebook wants to offer the procedure in a very handy and convenient device with automated cloud rendering. Facebook calls the camera “Game Changer” for Virtual Reality Surround 360 Camera.
The blueprints of the camera licenses to manufacturers. And the first product will release later this year. For detailed information on prices and availability, please contact Facebook.