- Kodak Pixpro 180 – a VR 360 camera that unfolds, points both lenses in the same direction and turns into a VR 180 stereoscopic 3D camera!
- Vuze+ VR 360 3D camera
- Stereoscopic VR 180 3D cameras, built on Google’s standard, introduced
- High End – 8 camera VR 360 3D system
- I assume there is also something new from LucidCam as well.
I will do a post at some point on re-formatting conventional 3D video for use in VR Cardboard viewers.
Conventional 3D video typically used side-by-side or top over bottom encoding of 3D content. Top over bottom does not work at all for conventional VR viewing apps, and side-by-side displays a horizontally squished/vertically stretched image perspective. Consequently, neither works with standard VR viewers. Side by side is also sometimes called “half side by side”.
Some apps do correctly recreate a side by side image but do so only in a small portion of the phone’s screen centered in front of the cardboard viewer’s lenses. Unfortunately, this small image cuts the image resolution so low that the image quality suffers tremendously and the original 3D content is nearly useless.
IF Cardboard viewing apps provided reformatting of standard 3D formats into VR 3D formats properly, this would not be a problem. But for now, it is a big problem.
A possible solution, based on my tests, is to take one’s original stereoscopic 3D and recompress an output file as full size, side by side. Upload the full size, side by side video to Youtube.
When played back on the Youtube viewer, these videos display using most of the phone screen, such that image resolution remains very good. Each eye sees an original image in a 960×540 resolution (roughly) which is far better than perhaps half of that seen on conventional side by side Cardboard viewing apps.
More on this another time.