Skip to main content

Facebook will license its new 360 cameras that capture in six degrees of freedom




On day two of Facebook’s F8 conference, Facebook’s CTO Mike Schroepfer showed off designs for two new 360 cameras that the company is going to help push to market. The x24, with 24 cameras, and its little brother the x6, with six cameras, can each capture in six degrees of freedom for more immersive 360 content. Facebook plans to license the designs of the two cameras to select commercial partners to get each to market later this year.

Prototyped in Facebook’s Area 404, the x24 combines the FLIR camera system with Facebook’s proprietary architecture. Being able to shoot in six degrees of freedom (6DoF) cuts out a lot of the work that would traditionally be required to create 360 videos where the watcher can tilt their head in all directions without sacrificing the believability of a given shot.


The conceptual idea, sometimes referred to as volumetric capture, has been heralded for some time as a major milestone for VR. Startups like Lytro have been betting on light fields to get the job done, while 8i has taken a software approach. Instead, Facebook is taking a sparse lens orientation approach that avoids the complex rigs all-together.

“Unfortunately, capturing full 6-DoF 360 videos requires more complex hardware setups like camera arrays or light-field cameras that are not affordable and easy to use for novice users,” a team of Adobe researchers said in a recent paper on the subject.

The benefit of capturing depth information at the pixel level is that it enables fun post-production video masking where a creator could swap out mountains in the background of a video for a beach instead.

These new cameras, building on the original Surround 360, also look fantastic. The old Surround seemed to draw inspiration from the spinning top at the end of Inception, but the x24 and x6’s smaller, simple spherical design is exactly the familiar and welcoming look you want from futuristic technology.

“Part of what we are doing with the ecosystem, and the camera itself, is giving these tools to content creators so they can start to develop this artistic language,” explained Brian Cabral, Facebook’s director of engineering.

Bootstrapping a community is hard work, but Facebook realizes that the success of everything, from News Feed 360 videos to the Oculus itself, depends on an ecosystem of content creators. To this avail, Facebook is partnering with post-production companies and VFX houses, including Adobe, Otoy, Foundry, Mettle, DXO, Here Be Dragons, Framestore, Magnopus and The Mill.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document?  That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...
1 comment
Read more

Build Your Own Awesome Personal 3D Avatar with Avatara

Do you use social networks and want to build your own awesome 3D avatar? Maybe you want to send someone a cute cuddly image of yourself (kind of)? Or maybe you have your own ideas of what you would do with an Avatar… Well look no further than Avatara which I discovered from the MakeUseOf directory . You can create 3d avatars out of pre-set up templates or create your own from scratch. To start, visit Avatara’s homepage . You will see this screen: Click Get Started to umm, get started! That will take you to this screen: You see that you can build your own Avatar using an uploaded head shot like the Obama one above (just an example, guys). Or roll with one of their awesome avatars. I chose to start with a blank avatar by clicking Start with a blank avatar at the bottom of the screen. That takes you to here: I clicked on the filter at the top and told it to filter out everything but male characters and then I saw this: I rolled with Buck and continued. You need to click Select...
1 comment
Read more

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a...
Post a Comment
Read more