Having a portable HMD is pretty neat
I’ve been toying around with the idea of leveraging portable VR as a means of entertaining and engaging people around me. As such I purchased a cheap VR HMD (head mounted display) dubbed VR Box 2.0 and a new Android-powered Smart Phone.
One of the simplest use cases involve using Google’s Cardboard Camera to record 360 degree images of events and gatherings I attend. Useful to convey the experience in a more “immersive” way than just photos on my phone and explaining what has happened. The cool thing about Google’s Cardboard Camera is that it also records audio so, as an example, if you attend a talk/seminar you can record a VR panorama with background audio. Or, in my most recent use case, use it as a tour guide of the city I live in for my parrents back home.
But I can also extend on the usage of the cardboard camera to much more than stereoscopic images with background audio to be experienced using the camera app. For example all images recorded can be shared and viewed with any device able to connect to the internet as a panoramic photo. The cool thing is that all the VR data and audio is coded into the image header. A use case for this would be importing the images into a 3D engine (such as Unity), setting up a cylinder projection and waypoints. The idea is to record VR footage from an event (let’s say a concert) from different locations (middle of the cround, near the stage, back from the croud, on top of a building), overlay the actual audio track from the songs (as the audio captured with the cardboard camera is pretty bad) and allow anyone to toggle through this locations and enjoy the concert.
Facebook now allows 360 videos to be played inside it’s pages. Couple this with the VR Unity project and you can show your fans what they missed. Or, even better publish the project for other HMD users as a marketing tool for your venues and/or events.
P.s. you can download and check out the 3 cardboard images from this post following this links (just make sure to turn off the audio. Concerts are really loud and noisy):
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