360 degree video!

Batutta

Batutta

Major Contributor
I was clicking around this hotel website and came across this 360 video tour of the grounds. Not a photo panorama, a video panorama you can pan around while video plays. I'm sure the tech is old but hey, I never seen one before and thought it was way cool--

http://www.acehotel.com/palmsprings/360
 
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Pretty cool! If a Palm Springs hotel is doing it, can it be that old?

I'd love to know how it's done... can't really wrap my head, uh... around it.
 
I used to work for a company that did 360 degree virtual video tours - they released the footage literally a few days ago. The technology isn't new, but the market for it is still in its infancy and there are a lot of pros and cons to consider when creating this sort of media. Regardless the stuff is very very neat (not to mention when you watch it in a dome theatre or with motion-tracking goggles on that it is almost mind bending)

http://demos.immersivemedia.com/POICollect.php?clip=IM302
scroll down and select which landmark/point of interest you'd like to see under where it "Select a POI & Get Immersed!"
 
Saw one about a year ago of a drive down a NYC street. It was pretty cool. We are living in the future!
 
i want to know how you'd do this too. it's easy with photos, wouldn't know where to start with video though. would there be a way to do it with one of those 360 panorama lenses mounted to an hdslr? I guess you could shoot it that way, but I don't know what you'd do with it after that. to be interactive it's gotta be flash or java or something right? maybe you could shoot it with one of those lenses, which would give you a super wide video image, then use some java export program to project the video into a cylinder, like you do with photos. I don't know what I'm talking about
 
I believe it's using the half sphere mirror to shoot the vid. Then you can export it to frames and process each one in the "unbending" software to create strips. Then you'd need a special player to control it, but that shouldn't be too hard.
 
my buddy just did some stuff for NeuStep who uses a DLSR/mirror configuration - but it's all still images. At IMC we used a custom built 360 degree cam with 11 lenses (the 12th one would have been where the base of the camera sits - hence the "black hole" at the bottom of all the videos). The 11 video streams were fed directly to a hard drive and, as you can imagine, would take up enormous amounts of space even being SD. We went through boxes of 500GB hard drives every week. The footage was then stitched together to create a "spherical video" - I honestly can't say more than that, and hopefully won't get in trouble for saying this much since they had us sign NDAs when hired and I am legally required to keep my mouth shut of a lot of what we did for the next 1 year, 2 months and 9 days. It's all very cool stuff though and I am really glad they finally released the footage for people to see. There is a picture attached of me with one of our rigs - you can see the camera on top.
best,
Adam
 

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adamrahn said:
my buddy just did some stuff for NeuStep who uses a DLSR/mirror configuration - but it's all still images. At IMC we used a custom built 360 degree cam with 11 lenses (the 12th one would have been where the base of the camera sits - hence the "black hole" at the bottom of all the videos). The 11 video streams were fed directly to a hard drive and, as you can imagine, would take up enormous amounts of space even being SD. We went through boxes of 500GB hard drives every week. The footage was then stitched together to create a "spherical video" - I honestly can't say more than that, and hopefully won't get in trouble for saying this much since they had us sign NDAs when hired and I am legally required to keep my mouth shut of a lot of what we did for the next 1 year, 2 months and 9 days. It's all very cool stuff though and I am really glad they finally released the footage for people to see. There is a picture attached of me with one of our rigs - you can see the camera on top.
best,
Adam
Click to expand...

This was pretty much all I was coming up with while trying to think of how it could be done. I understand the mirror/sphere concept, but the distortion would be crazy even with the "unbending software". There'd be dead spots.

Only way I could think would be multiple cams; syncing (or stitching) the footage.
 
This technology would make one rad virtual reality film. Imagine being 'in the middle' of the movie. You're in the living room while zombies are breaking into the house and you're able to look up and down left and right at all of the action.

Yeah.

(Not trying to zombie geek of course)
 
Yeah, the cameras were bought and used by companies before for that "in the middle of the action" feeling (even an adult film company I think), I couldn't tell you about any of the results (for the porn or other works - never got a chance to see anything), but we were hard pressed to find a way to come up with a feasible way of doing that sort of thing - lighting is a huge issue since you can see damn near everything and don't want gear in all the shots. I'm sure in several years if this technology really comes into play and is utilized in the narrative/fictional storytelling market that someone will have good ideas about how to utilize it. It is an amazing technology nonetheless
 
adamrahn said:
Yeah, the cameras were bought and used by companies before for that "in the middle of the action" feeling (even an adult film company I think), I couldn't tell you about any of the results (for the porn or other works - never got a chance to see anything), but we were hard pressed to find a way to come up with a feasible way of doing that sort of thing - lighting is a huge issue since you can see damn near everything and don't want gear in all the shots. I'm sure in several years if this technology really comes into play and is utilized in the narrative/fictional storytelling market that someone will have good ideas about how to utilize it. It is an amazing technology nonetheless
Click to expand...

I was wondering where the hell the crew was, probably down on the floor. Even a 270 film done like this would be interesting and would maybe be more feasible.
 
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