Immersive Video for All

You wouldn’t happen to be in the market for a video camera that films in 360-degrees and produces video that can be viewed in VR headsets and on any number of other screens you might have handy? You are? Well, good news. At the F8 conference for Facebook developers, the company announced the Surround360. Wired Magazine describes it:

Built from off-the-shelf hardware worth roughly $30,000, this black circular camera — with its 17 evenly spaced lenses — looks kinda like the flying droid that descends onto the ice planet at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back (though it lacks those insect-like dangly legs). Drawing images from all 17 of those lenses, it produces 360-degree spherical video

$30,000 a bit out of reach? No worries. The company is giving away both the hardware designs and the software. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg looks at the Surround360 as a tool for community building noting, “the best way to advance the technology is to work on it as a community.”

Facebook plans to share the plans for the technology this summer on GitHub.

Read more at Wired Magazine