Sam Sure & Giacomo | Hacker News Reader

Sam Sure & Giacomo

samsureandgiacomo.com

49 pointsBenjy16 comments

This is interesting tech. I feel like I should like it.

Watching these 360° videos, I always feel a certain anxiety. Part of it is technical – the interface is so clunky that "swiveling my head" is painfully awkward. But part of it is inherent – I worry that I'll miss the part I'm "really" supposed to be watching. I feel like I should replay the video 3-4 times to take it all in, but I just don't have that kind of time. I wind up navigating away to resolve the tension.

A big part of cinematography is directing the viewer's eye through framing, focus, etc. A brilliant example is the 3D IMAX version of Avatar. The giant screen is only the first challenge. Since curent 3D technology simulates stereoscopic cues but not focal cues, they had to direct the viewer's attention in 3-axes to avoid uncomfortable perceptual mismatch. To their credit, this only happened to me a couple times.

So despite the cool tech, this is a step backward for visual storytelling imho.

This is pretty neat - can anyone give any insight/guesses into how this was done?

Maybe this picture will help you: http://www.creativeapplications.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/...

Now you have different options to display it. One is to map it on a 3D object and place a camera inside the object.

More info and movies: http://www.cornflex.org/?p=1

Well, the stupid way to do this involves having a stand with many cameras mounted in a globe shape, such that the viewing angles of all the cameras overlap. This is expensive. The more elegant solution is to use half-globe mirror (or two) to get 360 vision with 1 camera:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnidirectional_camera http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~kostas/omni.html

This is getting very popular in robotics applications because it's cheap and a simple way to get 360 surroundings data. From this, you can localize and / or detect obstacles.

Here's the mirror way of doing it:

http://www.360video.com

There's a link on the home page showing what the uncorrected video looks like (it's a giant video donut).

You get better image quality (e.g. no stitching errors), but lower resolution, because the whole environment has to fit in the same 1080P frame.

I would say this is more of a tech demo and not a 'great use'.

A great use of 360 degree filming would be the drive the Haiti after the earthquake: http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2010/01/world/haiti.360/index...

I wonder if we will see any "future indie cinema" use this? I'm imagining an interesting way to show a thriller/mystery from all angles. It would be a challenge to shoot but boy would that be incredible. There would be so much more to "miss".

So awesome! poignant it should reference the now seminal massive attack vid? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbVRA6ZAhKo

At 2:46, at first I thought I saw a person picking a pocket, but it turned out to be just someone bending down to get their own wallet. That would've been a funny easter-egg.

It'd be interesting to know how much it cost to make this. First time I've ever seen an interactive 360 video like this though and I gotta say I want to try it out now.

It looks like you can find a bloggie for around $200USD but the 360 Resolution is a little low. This site shows some openFrameworks work with bloggie:

http://www.flong.com/blog/2010/open-source-panoramic-video-b...

@1:20, you can see the artist's shadow on the wall while holding the camera.

You can also see him in the mirrors at 3:33 holding the camera. There is also visible warping of his arm around that time (and the next scene where he goes through a gate, very visible here)

So awesome! some day all videos will be like this

One hour on HN and the server is down.

Does it have to be so slow?

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