360 rumors

At Vidcon 2017, Google announced VR180 videos and cameras, which are 180-degree 3D videos and cameras that can capture the world from your point of view. VR180 videos are 180-degree 3D videos, similar to 3D 360 videos but only showing a forward-facing view.  While that may seem like significantly smaller view than 3D 360 videos, heatmaps show that most viewers view videos only looking at the forward view. Here is a playlist of sample VR180 videos (to see them in 3D, you'll need to view them with a Google Cardboard or similar viewer): WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE FROM STANDARD 360 VIDEOS? VR180 appears to be a separate format from the standard equirectangular 360 videos.  If you watch the video above without cardboard, you cannot look around the video the way you can with a hemispherical 360 video (such as from Entapano ).  Instead, the perspective is fixed until you click on the cardboard icon, which enables gyro viewing.  I am supposing it uses a special tag in its 360 met...

PhotoGearNews' Lok Cheung takes a look at the Yi 360 VR and the Yi Halo. Lok Cheung is well known to photographers as the former colleague of Kai Wong at DigitalRev (before they both left).  At DigitalRev, Lok was the one who was most interested in 360 cameras.  Anyway, he's now at PhotoGearNews. In this video from NAB Show 2017, Lok covers the Yi 360 VR with 5.7K and the Yi Halo 2nd-generation 8K 3D 360 Google Jump rig: In case you missed it, I also have a video from NAB about the Yi 360 VR. Too bad I didn't run into Lok when I was at NAB.  Kai posted a comment on my old blog one time. It would have been nice to say hello.  Perhaps next time!

At NAB Show, Yi Technology launched the Halo, a 360 camera capable of shooting at 3D 360 video at 8K.  Check out the sample 360 video! Yi made several announcements at NAB Show 2017, but the two most significant were the announcement of the Yi 360 VR, a 5.7K 360 camera, and the Yi Halo, a Google Jump rig.  We've talked about the Yi 360 VR  and showed samples here .  In this post, we'll talk about the Yi Halo. Last year, at the 2016 Google IO conference, Google announced that Yi Technology was creating a version of the Google Jump rig.  Everyone in the industry assumed that Yi's Google Jump rig would be a lower-cost version of the first commercial Google Jump rig, the GoPro Odyssey.  Instead, the Yi Halo offers additional features for the same price as the Odyssey. Here are the key specifications, highlighting differences from the GoPro Odyssey: - video resolution: 8192 x 8192 @ 30fps or 5760 x 5760 @ 60 fps. - sixteen Yi 4K cameras plus one up-cam...

I've posted a few times about the Panono, my favorite 360 camera for photography because of its hyper-detailed 108mp photos.  But the Panono costs $2,000.  Fortunately, you can capture high-resolution 360 photos with Panohero, a panoramic head for GoPro and Yi action cameras.  Not only will the photo have resolutions of 72 megapixels or higher, but there will also be no parallax stitching error. UPDATE : Panohero provided sample files shot on GoPro that you can use to try stitching yourself here . Before all-in-one 360 cameras were invented, photographers shot panoramas with traditional (non-360) cameras.  Today, panoramic photography is still the best way to capture 360 photos with detail that cannot be matched by existing 360 cameras. One problem with panoramic photography is that it's quite technical.  First, you need a suitable lens such as a fisheye lens, which are not always cheap.  Second, you'll need to shoot the panorama properly.  If you just...

Probably the biggest news for 360 cameras out of NAB Show 2017 is the Yi 360 VR, a 360 camera with 5.7K video, the highest video resolution for consumer 360 cameras thus far, for just $399.  I had a chance to talk to Yi Technology about the Yi 360 VR. Here is the 360 video interview with Yi Technology's Director of Marketing.  Also with me was Svend Even Haerra from NRK, Norway's Public Broadcasting Station.  You also get to see my reaction when I first found out about the Yi 360 VR! :D (To shoot the video, I used the Nikon Keymission 360 and Guru 360 gimbal .) If you found the video helpful, please take a moment to hit the Like button on YouTube, and and please consider subscribing to the 360 Rumors YouTube channel ! For specifications and other info on the Yi 360 VR see here .  Again, the Yi 360 VR is $399, shipping in June.  If you are interested in preordering the Yi 360 VR, you can sign up here  (you'll need to scroll down to the bottom of the page). ...