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Preview Jaunt's Made-for-VR 360 Degree, 3D Short Films
An anonymous reader writes Jaunt, a company that's raised more than $34 million to create a platform for live-action cinematic virtual reality experiences, has set out to demonstrate their toolset by producing three made-for-VR short films that are shot in 360 degrees and in 3D. Road to VR has an exclusive preview of the films, which the company says will have interactive trailers released very soon for Oculus Rift and Android (for use with Cardboard and other smartphone VR adapters).
If it wasn't, it could have mentioned also the Samsung Beyond camera project or the Panocam 3D or 360heros.
Oh well...
Ok, time to use the "Ask the Audience" lifeline: How does one shoot 3D in 360 without it needing an infinite amount of film?
It's not 3D in 360. It's stereoscopy in 360.
You know Google street view where you can rotate around 360 degrees? Well it's like that but shot with 2 cameras for 3D effect.
It's not quite that simple. 360 with a single camera can be trivially stitched together because you can rotate the camera around a single point. With two cameras you are no longer dealing with just rotation, when you rotate a pair of cameras the individual cameras get translated as well, since they are offset from the point of rotation. If you try to stitch the images together you will get very noticable seams, especially when objects are close to the camera. There are ways around that with lots of cameras and more intelligent stitching algorithms, but so far it's still an open area of research on how to do it best. And even if you successfully stitch things together, you have still the problem that a simple 3D video can't deal with head tilt or head translation, so maybe some kind of depthmap/voxel format is needed to make 3D video really pleasent and less of a hack.
This is not an ad. Early VR projects are interesting, and this post (even though it could be used for publicity) belongs here.
Yes, you can technically make 360 degree 3D. You can even make it work even when the viewer tilts their head, if you have a ball of cameras and the right software to correctly adjust the view for each eye in real time according to head position. Jaunt's camera is not a ball. It's a disk. Yes, it could still be accurate 3D as long as you don't tilt your head. They say it's 3D, but it's not very high quality or convincing. In fact I wasn't able to tell if it was really 3D or just seeing the same view through both my eyes.
That being said, they do not need to have it in 3D at all. VR is already *very* convincing without 3D and the effect of parallax disappears at 20 feet or so. I didn't feel it was required at all for the demo videos they showed me.
I built my own 2x4K VR camera, specifically designed for accurate 3D, and demoed alongside Jaunt in Boston. It's got 90x170 degrees FOV, which is more than enough to cover the DK2 horizontal FOV, and almost enough to cover its 100 degree vertical FOV. For one of my demo videos, I put peanut butter under the camera and recorded my dog licking it. Everyone responded the same, putting their arms up in front of them to wave him away. There were some squeals of delight. That's the point of 3D VR, in my opinion - accuracy and proximity, to make you really feel like something is there in front of you. Otherwise you might as well just go 360 and not sweat parallax accuracy, like Jaunt did.
I was getting ready to sell my cameras, make movies, and work with other people improving the rig design, but honestly I thought there'd be more talent and interest to work with. Boston really isn't anywhere close to being a Silicon Valley of the East. And I say that being an MIT graduate myself.