360 VR crawler short in Santa Cruz

[Thinkcooper]

My GMade R1 is a decent platform for experimentation. Latest testing has been with a 360 video camera for playback in a virtual reality headset (VR HMD). All the previewing has been in a GearVR, which is part of a mid-range VR system from Samsung; but it's a well designed consumer level pipeline to go from camera, to processed and stitched lat/long 360 video, to publishing on YouTube with previewing in a GearVR headset.

This is my current set-up for testing VR.


Samsung Gear Vr testing at Pleasure Point by thinkcooper, on Flickr


Here's a 6 minute compilation of a few 360 shots from this rig at Pleasure Point in Santa Cruz, California - a well known surf spot. The video can be viewed and panned in a browser that supports 360 video like Chrome, or on the YouTube app on a modern iPhone or Android device, or in an HMD like Google Cardboard, GEarVR, or Oculus Rift. This video isn't a great endorsement of VR, in fact it might make you a little motion sick unless you move your head with the crawler responding to the trail.

[MikeTheDiabetic]

very cool video. how does the camera work? is it constantly spinning?

[Thinkcooper]

Originally Posted by MikeTheDiabetic

very cool video. how does the camera work? is it constantly spinning?

The camera is fixed in position - no rotation needed - and captures a pair of circular front and rear images or video frames through two overlapping 190 degree fish eye lenses. There is sufficient overlap between the pair of images that common pixels between the two images are used to determine where to merge and stitch the image pairs together into a single panoramic 360. The images or video frames are processed/stitched together in a Samsung phone or via software on a laptop or desktop. The stitching produces an equirectangular panoramic image (like a classic map of the earth, unwrapped into a 2:1 rectangular flat image, stretched at the poles, undistorted at the equator). The video contains a metatag so that YouTube or VR headsets know it's a 360 image.

Bottomline, all you need to do is hold the camera so that its' sides are facing the least important areas of the scene and the lenses face the most important regions, then click the shutter on the phone, then save the images or video to the phone (that's when the stitching takes place)