The Odyssey has begun or at least come out into the open. The long awaited and delayed 16 camera, $15,000 360 VR camera has finally shipped. Right now it is only available to a select few companies, GoPro won’t even say how many companies but did name drop WEVR, VRSE, Specular Theory, Surreal, and Two Bit Circus as some of the first few.
The flying saucer-shaped rig has some interesting specs.
- Facebook has designed and built a durable, high-quality 3D-360 video capture system.
- The system includes a design for camera hardware and the accompanying stitching code, and we will make both available on GitHub this summer. We’re open-sourcing the camera and the software to accelerate the growth of the 3D-360 ecosystem — developers can leverage the designs and code, and content creators can use the camera in their productions.
- Building on top of an optical flow algorithm is a mathematically rigorous approach that produces superior results. Our code uses optical flow to compute left-right eye stereo disparity. We leverage this ability to generate seamless stereoscopic 360 panoramas, with little to no hand intervention.
- The stitching code drastically reduces post-production time. What is usually done by hand can now be done by algorithm, taking the stitching time from weeks to overnight.
- The system exports 4K, 6K, and 8K video for each eye. The 8K videos double industry standard output and can be played on Gear VR with Facebook’s custom Dynamic Streaming technology.