
Facebook Surround 360: An Open 3D-360 video capture system - runesoerensen
https://code.facebook.com/posts/1755691291326688/introducing-facebook-surround-360-an-open-high-quality-3d-360-video-capture-system
======
aresant
360 video is cool but feels a little gimmicky for personal use.

180 degree 3D video, on the other hand, is AWESOME - that's the true-life
look/feel that I think is going to be game changing and sell another 100m
units for GoPro or whomever comes up with it.

So far the players I know are:

[http://vuze.camera/](http://vuze.camera/)
[https://webeyevr.com/](https://webeyevr.com/)
[http://lucidcam.com/](http://lucidcam.com/)

Or some combo of kit that you can cobble together:
[http://shop.gopro.com/accessories/3d-hero-
system/AHD3D-001.h...](http://shop.gopro.com/accessories/3d-hero-
system/AHD3D-001.h..).

Or run a DIY game:
[http://www.stereoscopynews.com/hotnews/3d-technology/softwar...](http://www.stereoscopynews.com/hotnews/3d-technology/softwar..).

Anybody have any experience to share on a good consumer balanced solution?

~~~
joemi
What's notable about this announcement is that it claims to be 360 degree _3D_
video. The article talks about this. That means it's like a 180 degree 3D
video in every direction.

That said, I'm a bit skeptical about how well their method works. If you close
one eye and rotate your head, you'll notice parallax effects, and I'm not
confident that what Facebook has described will be able to reproduce that. But
I'd love to be proved wrong.

~~~
randyrand
They generate depth using optical flow and then generate separate images for
each eye.

------
tantalor
How does this compare to Jump for Cardboard & GoPro Odyssey from 8-10 months
ago?

[https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/jump/](https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/jump/)

[https://gopro.com/odyssey](https://gopro.com/odyssey)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9620224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9620224)

~~~
rsp1984
As far as I understand this Odyssey is GoPro building the actual hardware and
Google Jump is the software technology that powers it. In terms of goals, it's
pretty much the same as Facebook's new camera.

Other players in this space are Lytro [1] (they have pivoted away from
consumer cameras to professional VR capture hardware) and Jaunt [2].

[1] [https://www.lytro.com/immerge](https://www.lytro.com/immerge) [2]
[https://www.jauntvr.com/technology/](https://www.jauntvr.com/technology/)

------
mdorazio
Someone correct if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure they're using the
Grasshopper3 camera, which retails for about $3k, and there are 14 of them in
the pictured array. That's $42,000 just for the cameras. I know professional
video shooting equipment is expensive, but that's more than double the price
of a top of the line RED Epic-X camera that a professional 2d film crew might
shoot on.

------
aaronsnoswell
So far as I can tell from the scant technical details, this isn't a true 3D
360deg video solution. It seems like this camera will provide stereo 360deg
video for horizontally aligned left-right eye positions, which is not the same
as 3D 360deg video that supports any head and eye poses (that requires full
light field capture or reconstruction). This means any user viewing a video
that rolls their head left or right several degrees will get a headache pretty
fast. I'm sick of people claiming '3D' 360 video is the same as full 6DOF
tracked VR - it is not. </high horse>

------
erikpukinskis
It's hard for me to get excited about stereo 360 when we have light field
capture coming soon.

This feels like the era of 640x480 digital cameras... It's easy to see the
potential, and the current gen is still valuable for niche uses, but it's
clear the next generation is what will really deliver on the promise of
immersive video.

~~~
mrfusion
Light field capture coming soon? I'd like to learn more.

~~~
synotic
Check out Lytro Cinema:

[http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/11/lytro-cinema-is-giving-
film...](http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/11/lytro-cinema-is-giving-
filmmakers-400-gigabytes-per-second-of-creative-freedom/)

[https://www.lytro.com/cinema](https://www.lytro.com/cinema)

------
geekuillaume
I didn't find the link for all the specification about how to build one at
home. Is it really open source ?

~~~
cryptoz
It is not open source. In the article, it says,

> later this summer [Facebook] will put the hardware designs and video
> stitching algorithms on Github

I do think it will be open source eventually, but it doesn't seem to be right
now. We'll see.

~~~
TD-Linux
Hopefully it doesn't come with homegrown not-actually-free-software license
that their other 3D video repos had.
[https://github.com/facebook/transform](https://github.com/facebook/transform)

------
aresant
360 video is cool but feels a little gimmicky for personal use.

180 degree 3D video, on the other hand, is AWESOME - that's the true-life
look/feel that I think is going to be game changing and sell another 100m
units for GoPro or whomever comes up with it.

So far the players I know are:

[http://vuze.camera/](http://vuze.camera/)
[https://webeyevr.com/](https://webeyevr.com/)
[http://lucidcam.com/](http://lucidcam.com/)

Or some combo of kit that you can cobble together:

[http://shop.gopro.com/accessories/3d-hero-
system/AHD3D-001.h...](http://shop.gopro.com/accessories/3d-hero-
system/AHD3D-001.html)

Or run a DIY game:

[http://www.stereoscopynews.com/hotnews/3d-technology/softwar...](http://www.stereoscopynews.com/hotnews/3d-technology/software-
a-hardware-tools/3493-a-vertical-3d-rig-for-360-3d-video.html)

Anybody have any experience to share on a good consumer balanced solution?

~~~
melvinmt
Is there a VR headset out there that already allows you to experience 3D?

~~~
soylentcola
Depends what you mean. 3D/360-degree? It's _sort of_ doable using cameras and
software to stitch and interpolate all the different angles but you're still
viewing from a fixed perspective. That works in the current crop of VR
headsets. Same with 3D/180-degree (or similar wide angle but not 360 3D
stuff). I've watched several on my Rift dev unit.

Getting into "real" 3D, like being able to view from any angle is trickier but
there are experimental and in-development methods of doing this. The easiest
works for CG stuff (just look at your 3D content in your headset). The more
realistic it gets, the closer to a "movie" in 3D. Combining video footage with
CG environments is a nice little "cheat" that's already been played with as
well.

But the real challenge and (as I see it) the ultimate goal in this space is
being able to use something like multiple light field cameras or RGB+depth
cameras (think Kinect) arrayed around a room or environment and capturing both
live video and the 3-dimensional structure of the surroundings and any objects
or people. The depth data from the various angles needs to be combined and
"textured" with the video data in order to create something approaching a real
3D recording of something over time (so maybe they'll need to advertise as 4D
movies).

Even cooler is when you can compress all of this data and stream it over
networks to be decoded on the other end. The result will be like 3D
telepresence where you're all but transported to another location.

Microsoft has been working along those lines and it makes sense since they
have Kinect and Hololens. This is the sort of thing that will be the real
"killer app" for VR/AR as far as I can guess:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0)

~~~
ryandamm
The challenge, as you said, is the data compression. Well, that and optics;
it's hard to grab all the photons someone might see if they moved around....

------
danr4
Even though this is purely to fuel VR content creation for Oculus, at least
the invention is in the public domain (pending OS license and patent grant)

~~~
gautamb0
Agreed. Really looking forward to the stiching code being made available on
GitHub. I wish that Google would at least release some kind of an API for
their Cardboard Camera (e.g. allowing you to pass in a bunch of photos and get
a stitched 360 out), but if Facebook makes good on this, it could be even
better.

------
algorithm314
Why so many cameras?6 or 8 aren't enough?

~~~
talmand
I would imagine the stitching required a good bit of overlap of a video with
its neighboring videos.

~~~
dfbrown
Also for the 3d every direction needs to be visible by at least 2 cameras.

------
mrfusion
I'd like to see something that takes a depth map with lidar and then actually
lets you explore the photo.

~~~
spiderfarmer
Lidar isn't needed. Light rays themselves contain enough information to
rebuild the scene.

------
infocollector
Which cameras are they using. Is this pointgrey grasshopper3? Is there a
cheaper way to do this well? :)

------
mrfusion
How does this compare with the theta
[https://theta360.com/en/](https://theta360.com/en/)

It's much cheaper and available now.

~~~
drcode
Theta isn't 3d, it's like looking at the world with one eye closed.

~~~
skeletonjelly
Maybe a better analogy is that it's like listening to mono audio. Your analogy
would be like putting one earbud in.

------
vernie
Great news for Point Grey.

------
eveningcoffee
Works only if live feed is sent to FB servers. /s

------
jamesfmilne
Facebook is the last company I would want to buy this from.

~~~
HalcyonicStorm
Completely agreed. Their bottom line is to collect all your personal
information.

~~~
askafriend
I feel like there's a group of people who have a list of these sentiments that
they just copy and paste into any thread mentioning Facebook, adding
absolutely no original thought or insight.

