Re:Facebook Surround 360: An Open 3D-360 video capture system
by ryandamm on Tuesday April 12, 2016 @03:29PM
(#11482790)
The challenge, as you said, is the data compression. Well, that and optics; it's hard to grab all the photons someone might see if they moved around....
Re:Facebook Surround 360: An Open 3D-360 video capture system
by alasano on Tuesday April 12, 2016 @08:50PM
(#11484862)
I was already blown by seeing the Oculus conference in California in my GearVR (Next VR app). This is the type of technology which makes me dream about how good retirement will be one day.
Getting into "real" 3D, like being able to view from any angle is trickier but there are experimental and in-development methods of doing this. The easiest works for CG stuff (just look at your 3D content in your headset). The more realistic it gets, the closer to a "movie" in 3D. Combining video footage with CG environments is a nice little "cheat" that's already been played with as well.
But the real challenge and (as I see it) the ultimate goal in this space is being able to use something like multiple light field cameras or RGB+depth cameras (think Kinect) arrayed around a room or environment and capturing both live video and the 3-dimensional structure of the surroundings and any objects or people. The depth data from the various angles needs to be combined and "textured" with the video data in order to create something approaching a real 3D recording of something over time (so maybe they'll need to advertise as 4D movies).
Even cooler is when you can compress all of this data and stream it over networks to be decoded on the other end. The result will be like 3D telepresence where you're all but transported to another location.
Microsoft has been working along those lines and it makes sense since they have Kinect and Hololens. This is the sort of thing that will be the real "killer app" for VR/AR as far as I can guess: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0