Today at F8 conference, Facebook revealed the “Surround 360”, a 17-lens 3D VR camera that looks like a UFO on a stick and requires almost zero laborious post-production work, unlike most VR rigs. Facebook won’t be selling the Surround 360. Instead, later this summer it will put the hardware designs and video stitching algorithms will be available to developers on GitHub this summer. All the parts can be bought online for $30,000.
Facebook is open-sourcing the camera 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," said Chris Cox, Facebook's chief product officer.
The four main draws of the Surround 360 camera:
- Extremely high-quality footage: its 17 4-megapixel lenses can shoot in 4K, 6K, and even 8K, dumping the 30-gigabit per second data to a hard drive over USB. The one fish eye lens on top and two on the bottom mean there’s no hole in the footage above or beneath you, and the pole the camera stands on disappears.
- Durability: its aluminum casing can be quickly assembled and disassembled. It will survive tough conditions like the desert, and it can shoot for hours straight without overheating
- Portability: it’s designed to handle frequent plane flights, and its rolling base makes it simple to move around.
- Near zero post-production required: by using gen-locking to connect all the lenses, the software can do less work so footage is ready for distribution an order of magnitude faster, in a day rather than weeks.
Clearly, Facebook’s goal is simply to catalyze 360 and VR content production to fill its ad-fueled social network and the headsets it sells with teleportations worth your time.
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