Great innovations come from thinking outside the box. Sometimes it occurs when you see one invention and think of another unexpected use for it. My new friend Peter Murphy of VRMedia from the land down under, found it with the SuperHero 3D System. Peter realized that he could use the Trigger/Sync cable and software for use with his modified GoPro Hero 3’s. This story originally appeared in stereoscopynews.com.
Peter, hats off to you for thinking outside the box. Keep it up!
A Vertical 3D Rig for 360° 3D Video
stereoscopynews.com» December 31, 2013
MediaVR (Surry Hills, Australia) developed a stereoscopic 3D vertical rig featuring a couple of GoPRO Black Hero3+ cameras and Sunex Fisheye lenses. The rig will be used to shot panoramic 3D videos for the Oculus Rift immersive VR helmet. Camera synchronization is done with a 3DGuy sync cable and software.
The Oculus Rift head mounted display has been greeted with rapture by virtual reality fans and has received $90 million in investor funding. The consumer version, to be released later next year will be much more high resolution than the actual 2x640x800 pixels with better latency and position tracking than the current developer’s kit – which is in 40,000 developers’ hands so far. Visit OCULUS for more details.
Oculus-Rift 250x
But the current developer’s version ($300) offers already a very immersive experience with excellent tracking and extremely wide angle field of view — (80° H and 110° V) — for each eye. Low resolution is the major complaint with the current version.
Besides its main target audience, gaming, it is being used for many things, including the interactive viewing of 2D and stereoscopic 3D panoramas — both still and video.
3D Content for the Rift
There is a burgeoning market for content and content creation and viewing solutions in these formats for the Rift. VRPlayer is a very popular viewer for tracked panoramic 3D image and video viewing on the Rift.
Regular 3D movies are often viewed on the Rift in “virtual cinema” apps, some of which are multiuser. eg. VRCinema and Stereoscopic Player (windows required for both).
Panoramic content is shot actually with technologies from Next3D, Panocam3D and ConditionOne. An example of a 3D immersive video is visible here under.
Shooting Skammekrogen – Oculus Rift + Go Pro & Unity 3D
Stereoscopic Spherical 360° Videos
Stereoscopic spherical 360° videos are a hard capture problem and universal solutions (for example, ones that can be used for close-ups, without stitching glitches) are not available yet in the public realm. It is straightforward to render stereoscopic CG 360° panoramic videos but even then full correct stereo feeling in all directions is difficult to achieve without depth map or plenoptic solutions — which have many rendering and playback issues (though VRPlayer supports mono+depth 360° panorama still and video playback).
goprovertical 400x
132° Wide Angle Lenses
It is simple however to produce less than 360° wide angle 3D videos with a pair of GoPRO HERO2 cameras and the GoPRO 3D kit that work nicely in the Rift. Two vertical videos with this setup (see picture here above), with the standard lenses in side by side mode, on YouTube for example, work directly in the Rift using the Rift as a simple 3D viewer without tracking as seen here under.
Puppies for the Oculus Rift
Fisheye Lenses
To produce a tracked viewing experience (“lookaround” movies) you need to replace the standard GoPRO 132° lenses with wider ones, one that produce full circle coverage. Of course then the effective parallax at the lateral extremes of the 180 degree viewable zone is zero but it still provides an extremely novel, immersive experience. The Oculus Rift, with its almost invisible peripheral frames, is relatively immune from edge violations so strong depth and zooming content is very well accepted, and tolerance for vertical disparities seems much greater than normal for some reason.
The GoPRO 3 Black Vertical Rig
With full circle lenses on the GoPRO 2 the effective resolution was too poor to be satisfying. So the lack of a 3D sync solution for later GoPRO 3 and 3+ Black models has been a stumbling block. The recent 3D sync solution by 3dguy.tv seems to work well however so MediaVR developed rigs using that solution for stereoscopic 180° video capture for the Rift.
The 3dguy.tv solution comes optionally with the option for plugging in LCD Backpacs so you can have mono or stereo viewing if you add magnifying optics (or perhaps you are good at free viewing). The autoexec scripts used to sync the cameras on power up may also be used to lock exposure to a fixed value for the whole shot, avoiding brightness issues.
Tests are Under Way
High resolution from the GoPRO 3 Black, exposure lock, and good sync makes an exciting combination for video capture of still 360° spherical panoramas as stereoscopic still panoramas are traditionally produced by stitching very many thin slices from lots of rotating shots — sometimes you need hundreds of shots for close high depth subjects, and rapid rotation is necessary for high action scenes.
With 4K video options in recent GoPRO 3 and 3+ and exposure lock, our vertical rig prototype is a very viable proposition which MediaVR is starting to test now.
Tools for creating 360° stereoscopic videos are on the good path to provide stunning live content for the HD Oculus Rift when it will hit the consumer market in 2014!
Written in collaboration with Peter Murphy from MediaVR (mediavr at gmail).