We've been waiting 4 years. I just don't understand what is taking so long.
Even at a low resolution, the difference is night and day. Even with a very small window, this is a leap forward for VR immersion. Why in the hell is no one using it?!?
As they state, it requires a 46 camera rig to record, immense computational power to compress the data into something usable, and a 1 Gbs data stream, which means there is nearly zero commercial use, and certainly not widespread use, at those specs.
Oh, and it's covered in a patent minefield. You can check the author names to see. Pretty much every paper from Google gets covered in them, so be wary of implementing anything you read in their papers without a serious patent search. This one took me 10 seconds.
Not everything whizzbang you see in a paper or demo is not being sold as consumer products because of ignorance. There is always a reason, usually one you have not discovered yet.
I can't say I've had any good experiences with VR video... it's incredibly natural for gaming, but for scripted video having my head control the camera dilutes the experience for me: you either lose a key part of the language of cinema, or you make people sick by periodically taking control away from them.
The absolute best application of VR video I can imagine is immersive theatre, and I think with videogame engines are accomplishing that very well with modern performance capture.
Is there an experience you'd recommend that you think could change my mind?
Beyond that, though, there is a lot of potential just past the horizon. Check out the demo for the paper I linked. Sure, you can't move around very far, but you can move enough to be part of the scene, unlike the usual tripod video setup.
One challenge here is dedicated hardware support, running any sort of video processing/decoding on the CPU is unfeasible (GPU less so), particularly if the context is a battery-powered device (Quest 3, Apple Vision Pro), with high resolution and framerate (6K-8K, 60fps).
That doesn't even get into the logistics of capturing, serving, and software supporting this video data either
Even with its relatively low resolution, the demo blew me away. Given a choice between current 8K@120 content and something equivalent to this 4 year old demo, I would choose the latter hands down.