Virtual reality content is about to become the hottest thing ever. My Co-Founder Brayton Williams just wrote a post explaining how great the Lebron James VR experience was. Everyone is going to be wanting one of these VR devices soon (Oculus and HTC just launched), however the ability to capture content will still be out of reach of a lot of people.
I thought that I would do a quick overview of capture for those who might be thinking about taking the leap of “VR Content Creator.” This is written with the caveat that one of the main creators of content will be computer software: Unity, Unreal or Cryengine. Another space that we are investing heavily, but not included in this list description.
360 Video Capture
In Virtual Reality, because YouTube and Facebook have both enabled it, the most commonly viewed VR content is 360 Video content, and this is captured with a 360 Video camera. As of now, the only consumer accessible camera is something called the Ricoh Theta.
There are other production level cameras that are higher quality, but those are crazy expensive (like more than $50k and really they only let you lease them). One is made by Jaunt and the other made by Nokia. There is a good write up on a few others here, but I’m giving the overview as someone who sees a lot of virtual reality.
So my sense is that 360 Video is going to be a major on-boarding device for Virtual Reality to end up in everyone’s home. It will be relatively easy to create content as these cameras get better and better.
We have a company called Orb, that is working on a more approachable production quality camera that does 3D 360, which is the level you need.
Volumetric 3D capture (Real time and not)
The concept of Volumetric scanning is to be able to change your perspective while experiencing the captured experience. With 360 Video capture you can only view from the location it is recorded from, volumetric scanning lets you move around the space. It’s also a lot more complicated to record, the technology requires a combination of sensors and cameras and software that stitches together 3D imaging from multiple angles.
A couple companies focused on this are AEMass and 8i. Both of these companies are Boost VC portfolio companies.
Photogrammetry
This is the process of taking high resolution 2D digital photos and piecing them together with an algorithm to create high fidelity scenes of real places. This creates real 1 to 1 digital representations of the locations. This works fantastic for tourism in VR, or even creating levels for video games. The resolution is as good as the real thing.
A company that does this is called Realities.io, also a Boost VC company.
I explain these pieces of VR capture a lot, so I thought that it warranted a blog post. Check out more of our Boost VC portfolio companies at www.boost.vc.
Photogrammetry
