Blog

The GoPro action camera has been the staple of the 360 video industry for years now. Love it or hate it, there’s no other camera system in the world with as many options and versatility in such a small package for an affordable price. It’s not a perfect system by any means, but we’ve all learned how to work around the many pain points. Until now, GoPro has remained pretty uninvolved in the 360 video scene. GoPro Omni was their first official venture into the 360 video market, and we put it through it's paces.

We get a lot of requests from clients for walking tours moving through houses, facilities, offices or buildings. The biggest challenge to do this in 360 video is to hide from your own camera. If you hold the camera, not only are you in your own shot but you are also undoubtedly making things unstable with your own motion. We decided to build our own rover dolly system for smooth motion at walking speeds.

Sometimes the hardest thing to explain about VR is how to get it to the audience. For most, this is where VR aspirations end. Projects can become cost prohibitive. If you truly want to reach a wide audience, there’s simply not one single platform that will do that for you. That’s not to say they aren’t coming, but for now, what can we do to reach the biggest audience?

Over this past six months we’ve seen the emergence of many 360 video platforms. Our goal at 360 Labs is to get our content in front of as many eyeballs as possible, so we’ve tested a good number of these platforms and would like to share our findings with the community.

Since we began showing lots of demonstrations of our content in the Samsung Gear VR, we’ve noticed that a lot of people don’t really understand the difference between what’s stereoscopic 3D and what isn’t. Because of the nature of our content, everything in our library to date is monoscopic 360 video. In many situations, stereoscopic 3D in VR can add a lot of coolness factor to a production, but for some use cases it doesn’t work very well.