Issues (and advices) in shooting VR-videos and 360-videos

As a shower thought of the day, I was thinking about 360-videos. We all love them, especially if they’re 3D and if they tell an interesting story (like Ashes To Ashes does). There’s a reason if “storytelling” is one of the buzzwords of VR ecosystem: virtual reality is a great medium to create empathy, to create strong feelings by living stories. And 360-videos are a good medium for offering high-quality storytelling.

But shooting 360 videos has lots of issues and here I want to highlight some of them.

Hardware

How to shoot this kind of videos? There are various means, but the most popular are:

• 360-cameras: for €249 you can afford buying a Samsung Gear 360 (2017 edition), which can record 360-videos up to 4K in resolution! Really cool. But… these videos will not be 3D, meaning that you will see the videos as projected on a sphere around you, you won’t get the sense of depth of the objects contained in it;
• 2+ GoPro: as PornFoxVR guy told me, with 2 GoPro cameras and some post-processing you can record a 3D video with a 180° FOV. Incrementing the number of GoPros and using dedicated programs, you can shoot 3D videos with a bigger field of view. This solution is more expensive than the previous one, but can offer 3D imagery that in my opinion makes the video more real, more VR (some people argue that 360-videos are not true VR);
• Professional VR cameras: professional spheres full of cameras that record a 360-video in 3D. These are the devices used by Jaunt or by other professional companies. Nokia sells a camera of this type for $45.000, so we’re talking about professional stuff;

Nokia OZO Camera, that can record 360-3D-videos and 360-audio with amazing quality. But it ain’t cheap (Image by Nokia)

Dear Angelica review

Friday evening I decided to have a look at the featured experience on the Oculus Store: Dear Angelica. I knew that this was some kind of 360-video experience, since there was a Sundance Film Festival in the corner of the tile… and I surely prefer interactive experiences. Furthermore in the description there was written that the story was about some kind of girl remembering some episodes of her life… and I was like: “oh God why, this surely will be some kind of super-boring stuff”. I want an action game Super Hot, not this kind of soap opera stuff. But I said to myself: “ok, let’s watch it anyway… so I can review it for my dear readers” (I was sacrificing for you!).

Well, the first 10 seconds I got bored by it… but in the end I was like “it is fu*king awesome”. But not a standard “awesome”… but an “awesome” as is said by the voice of Unreal Tournament when you make lots of kills in a row.

3 Things We Need To Get Better At While Working With VR

Today I’m proud to host here a post written by Marvin, a great VR passionate from England, owner of blog Moments in VR and of a great VR Youtube channel. I invite you to see his great work… but before that let’s all read his new post! Let’s go Marvin!

Virtual Reality is here. It’s new (almost), it’s exciting and It still has a long way to go.

No matter how we look at it, we’re only scratching the surface of this new technology and it’s close cousins Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality

Before we go any further let’s define just what these technologies are.