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Facebook, ever since its inception, has given a detailed amount of attention to sharing of content and making it available to the larger mass of users. Over the past years, the social-networking giant has been quite enthusiastically working to strengthen the videography mode of communication and socializing by releasing features like 360 videos and Facebook Live.
However, after the $2 billion acquisition of Oculus, the company has made a considerable progress in creating immersive-rich content and more recently, the latest visuals from the insides of the R&D Lab at Oculus hints at some promising development taking place in the VR sector.
However, this time, the company has recently brought us a new Tool called the Capture 360 SDK that lets users record and share their VR experiences in the form of 360 images and videos. To share the 360 video without compromising on its quality, Facebook says that it uses a special method called as the Cube Mapping Technology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYT9KpMbTBw
Understanding the Cube Mapping Technology
The existing traditional method of capturing 360 photos and videos involves capturing every scene of the 360 image, overlapping each of these images and stitching them in one 360-image, and then finally encoding it in the final photo with high-resolution quality. However, this is quite a time and resource-intensive method requiring high-end computer stuff and other resources. Check the below GIF to understand this.
GIF credit: Facebook
Moreover, while using other methods of directly streaming the 360 videos over the Twitch and YouTube platform, the image quality was found to get compromised a lot. Facebook derived this new method of Cube Mapping that uses a combination of six cube faces. This method has been in use for delivering high computer graphics since long.
With features like no geometry distortion and no poles within the equirectangular projection, Cube Maps help to retain the image quality giving you an experience as if you are watching the objects head-on. This helps to retain a better quality in Cube Mapping over the stitching method.
GIF credit: Facebook
Advantages of the Cube Mapping Technology
Unlike the stitching method, Cube Mapping doesn’t require high-end computer hardware and software. Moreover, the Cube Mapping Technology delivers an equally good VR content output and, more importantly, can retain the same 4K image quality even while streaming. This means that it can easily maintain the 90 fps requirement for VR. Moreover, the 360 Capture SDK is capable of maintaining both the minimum resolution of 1080p for News Feed as well the 4K resolution in VR.
While explaining this technology, Product Manager at the Facebook’s Media Division, Chetan Gupta said, “We realized that the standard method is not really feasible for real-time capture of 4K 360-degree video. We instead came up with a new method, which is where we capture the final output of that 360 video right from the game engine.”
Compatibility and Sharing
The 360 Capture SDK has been designed in a way to offer broader compatibility over several platforms. For better mass adoption, the SDK supports famous game engines in VR like the Unity and Unreal. Also, the recorded 360 video can be viewed both in VR and also on your Facebook’s Mobile App.
Due to its broader compatibility over different platforms, and low hardware requirement and image quality retention, this could prove to be a wonderful tool to share your VR and gaming experiences with your friends. This means you can instantly share the videos new hot chicks and performers in VR porn with your friends and also your virtual reality porn gaming experiences like playing with the model’s assets, different fucking positions and styles and a lot more.
This can certainly prove to be a major breakthrough in VR technology wherein more content can be easily shared, experienced and appreciated amongst multiple users
Earlier I had impression that samsung and htc are doing some great stuff in VR world but in last couple of months facebook is getting very aggressive and launching so many things for the VR industry.