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Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

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/ https://webeyevr.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....

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

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

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I think 360 video is great for personal use. Earlier this year I bought an $350 Ricoh Theta S and shot some 360 video. Here is an example of my friend [1] colliding into me while skiing (might want to turn the sound down though, sorry). With just a 180 camera you wouldn't be able to see what happened and why.

3D cameras are great, but 360 takes you a long way toward immersion when used in a headset. Stereoscopy works well only when the objects you care about are between 6 and 20 feet from the camera. Outside of that stereoscopy doesn't give anymore depth cues simply because of how close together our eyes are. Here is a photo wigglegram [2] I took with a $20 Nimslo 3D; it's widest lenses are as far apart as your eyes. Note how flat the background starts to look after the second row of people? That is because they are too far.

As a weird camera and VR enthusiast, I have found it non intuitive to predict what will work or not. I hope this facebook rig and software that uses "optical flow to compute left-right eye stereo disparity" will be immersive and practical. 360 in 3D facebook and google promise sounds fantastic. In a few years, I hope we will have something for the non-professional content producer.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/fooladder/videos/vb.8800136/1010602... [2] http://fooladder.com/post/115435676962/at-the-concert

I couldn't disagree with this more. For me, 3D is a gimmick. Always has been. Making it a wide field of view doesn't change that.

360-degree video, on the other hand, adds a crazy new element to how you experience things and how you shoot. It's easy to upload to Facebook and YouTube and it can be played back on any device. The coolest part of a 360 video is when you are standing in the same spot that it was filmed. It's like being able to travel back in time to when it was shot.

The coolest part about 360 video, in my opinion, is that it doesn't matter so much where the camera is. With enough resolution you can zoom crop into a standard frame. With just 2 cameras you can create all new kinds of linear content just by panning and cropping around the sphere.

It's mostly about the realities of the stitching though. 180 3D is usually done with two cameras facing forward with a good lens to capture the maximum from each side.

360 3d is a huge lie in reality, although when it's well done (Felix&Paul studios come to mind), it can be quite pleasing.

I'll be doing both 180 3d and 360 for a friends marriage. I'm using the 180 3d to have the guests come and leave the newlyweds a personal message. Everyone will come wish them good luck and lots of love etc.

Then the 360 shots are fixed and capture the feeling of the moment, like reliving it. The 3d effect on 180 feels better and your focus is guided too.

Anyways just my 2 cents.

Edit : Just noticed your post was about 3d vs non 3d for the most part.

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.

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

If you model the camera in 3D space within a sphere that the video is "projected" upon, would you still notice those parallax effects when closing one eye and looking around?

It's pretty nifty on a drone. Instead of just shooting some small field of view, fly a path over a cool area and let the viewer decide where to look.

I don't remember family holiday videos being that cool when i was younger!

I guess that announcement makes sense for professional content producers, but this is mostly a clickbait product. One that we won't probably see in real life, although it's clear that VR has pushed interest for 360 videos.

Good as an option, probably, but most of the time flat video is ideal. We'll see if that changes with these products or the ones made for big audiences (Samsung Gear 360, and LG Cam 360). I wouldn't bet my life on it. Adventure cameras have already reached their limits, it seems, for example, and I see a similar scenario on this case.

I am not so sure. I once played around with projecting an imax 3d space movie on the inside of a virtual sphere. It was a pretty awesome accident, because (so long as I didn't turn around and look at the seam) I had the illusion of asteroids and stuff actually floating in my space. I think there is a lot of potential for 360-3D video.

That said, I am not sure that content producers should focus too much on having things happening all around you. It's not great to constantly have to be looking all around, but it is useful to create the illusion of presence.

Indeed. Cheers!

The best bet as of today is an array of GoPros, same as for most 360 solutions. You can get about 60 degrees out of each lens after accounting for stitching overlap, so six of them are sufficient for a 180 degree stereoscopic picture. I've gotten some good results with this, though of course there's a lot of black space, which a 12+ camera rig would alleviate.

I think they called out the target audience being pro applications. This is a great opportunity to give someone like the NHL/NCAA/etc ability to stream 360 to a facebook base.

Two a6300's next to each other with Samyang 8mm fisheyes does the job nicely for 3D180

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