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Virtual reality tech companies are making every bit of effort to create rich and quality 360-degree content for immersive VR experiences. That being said, the professional camera hardware and software tools required to create 360-degree content are quite costly and are certainly out of reach of a normal consumer.
Moreover, direct streaming of 360-degree content to your VR headsets might require a massive amount of data consumptions and might sometimes also lead to blurry images. Finding out an appropriate mid-way through this, Google’s Daydream team and YouTube video team has recently unveiled a new VR180 video format.
VR180 Video Format
In its recent blog post, Google writes, “VR180 videos focus on what’s in front of you, are high resolution, and look great on desktop and on mobile.”
This means that all the videos created with Google’s new VR180 format will appear flat when viewed on your PC browser or mobile phones. However, when the same videos are viewed inside the VR headsets like the PlayStation VR, Google Cardboard or Daydream View, the 180-degree videos undergo a seamless transition with stereoscopic 3D while remarkably adding up the field of depth. The good thing is that this format also supports live streaming of videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5ZBKJC2Q8A
Cameras for VR180
Google says that its Daydream team is currently working on making traditional-like point-to-shoot cameras which will considerably reduce the film-maker’s efforts by simply pointing in the direction of the action and capturing the video.
Image credit: Lenovo
Moreover, Google is also in talks with experienced camera makers like Yi, Lenovo, and LG for producing easy-to-use VR180 cameras that could be arriving by this winter and will be something like the outline diagram shown above. The company is also starting with certification programs for other manufacturers to make their own VR180 compatible cameras.
Also, Google is allowing editors to use tools like Adobe Premiere Pro for easy editing of 180-degree videos so that they don’t need to use any complex software tools to get the resultant outputs.
It is great to see how virtual reality industry is taking over the old technologies. VR is definitely the future.
I guess this will give Google the upper-edge in VR industry as the new VR180 gives an average VR user to shoot and create immersive 3D content and will slowly curb the existing issue of insufficient availability of immersive 3D VR content… Looking forward for this cameras to be available to users
compression ratio is also very important and I guess this would solve that problem