Immersive 360° Videos With Motion
January 28th, 2008 by Jerome Dahdah360° images have come a long way in quality since the old days of Quicktime VR, but they never really did hit the kind of popularity you may come to expect from a 3D-ish approach. And really, maybe it’s just because they are static and thus mostly boring. That may change however. Immersive Media has specialized themselves on 360° films with a twist: the material is not static, but actual film footage playing. It does make for a much more interesting experience:
You can get a lot more demos here.
Incidentally, they are the same folks behind the Google Street View technology.
(Thanks, Datenvandalen)
January 28th, 2008 at 7:45 pm
This has got to require an insane amount of preprocessing, almost to the point where it’s easier to just recreate the whole scene in 3DStudio.
Also, all of the Quicktime VR-ish apps I saw (back when the word multimedia was in its early buzzword stages) were really bad because of low available bandwidth leading to low texture and model quality. While bandwidth is generally not so much of a concern today, I still don’t think that many people could stream this stuff, so it might be quite some years until 3D video becomes mainstream (read: will die a slow and horrible death).
Not that I don’t like…
January 29th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Thanks for your response, Simon. I must say I can’t really share your pessimism. I see your concerns in streaming at HD quality, since that will probably take a few years to become common practice, but the video you see above is streaming pretty well, albeit not the best quality. YouTube has terrible quality too, but it’s doing mighty well. I have no idea about the preprocessing that goes into this but if they are smart they have some kind of automated stitching process.
December 18th, 2010 at 5:58 am
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