Tech

17-lens 3D VR camera launched by Facebook

Published

8 years ago

April 13, 2016

17-lens 3D VR camera launched by Facebook

Facebook has announced the launch of a 17-lens 3D VR camera thus inventing its own virtual reality camera from scratch and open sourcing it so people can build their own and start shooting.

The VR camera 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 on Github. All the parts can be bought online for $30,000.

“We do not have ambitions of getting into the camera business, but we realize there wasn’t a good reference camera” Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox told reporters Monday. The four main draws of the Surround 360 VR camera are:

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 aluminium 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 genlocking 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.

The result is a camera that simplifies the VR capture process, and the footage is gorgeous. I got to see raw footage of two scenes exported from the camera and Viewed on a Gear VR headset. One showed people hanging out by the water near SF’s beautiful Palace Of The Fine Arts, and another was from Facebook’s laboratory in England where it’s building its solar-powered Aquila drones.

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