News
News Categories

Facebook’s open-source, 360-degree VR camera rig looks like something out of the future

By Koh Wanzi - on 13 Apr 2016, 11:21am

Facebook’s open-source, 360-degree VR camera rig looks like something out of the future

Facebook Surround 360 camera

At Facebook’s F8 developer conference today, the company revealed an open-source, reference design for a new 360-degree video capture system for producing high-quality 3D footage. Facebook plans to make the design specifications and stitching technology available on GitHub this summer, which will make it easier for VR content creators to access, and improve upon, the tools they need for high-quality content.

The new camera rig is dubbed the Facebook Surround 360, featuring a 17-camera array and web-based software that can capture images in 360-degrees and weave them together into a cohesive 3D landscape. The 17 cameras comprise 14 wide-angle cameras mounted onto a horizontal ring on its body, a single fish-eye camera on the top, and two more at the bottom. All of this is built using off-the-shelf hardware that costs around US$30,000.

The fish-eye cameras are what allow the rig to produce truly spherical images, and Facebook deliberately installed two cameras – instead of just one – at the bottom to enable it to remove the pole that holds up the cameras from the resulting 3D image.

Facebook Surround 360

The cameras on the Facebook Surround 360 also use something called a global shutter instead of a rolling one, which helps ensure that artifacts from the closing of individual shutters don’t show up on the final footage.

Facebook says the Surround 360 can work for several hours without overheating, and can even export videos with resolutions up to 8K. Video shot with Facebook’s camera rig can be viewed inside VR headsets like the Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR, or on the regular screens of smartphones, tablets and PCs. The video below is of the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco and Facebook's Aquila Lab in the UK, shot using the Surround 360.

Of course, the Surround 360 is far from the first camera rig designed to shoot in stereoscopic 3D. There is the US$15,000 GoPro Odyssey, the US$60,000 Nokia Ozo, and even the relatively affordable Ricoh Theta S that costs US$350.

However, Facebook’s solution stands out because the design and technology behind it is completely open-source. So while it is targeted at professionals and enthusiasts for now, third-parties could possibly adapt it into a consumer device.

Source: Facebook

Join HWZ's Telegram channel here and catch all the latest tech news!
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.