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Facebook Announces 'Surround 360' Open Source VR Camera (popsci.com)
Facebook is getting even more serious about 360-degree videos and content. At its developer conference, the social juggernaut announced the Surround 360, a 17-lens 3D VR camera. It's not available commercially yet. but the company has opened the design for anyone to modify. All the parts can be bought later this summer for about $30,000. Popular Science reports: The hardware is also coupled with custom software that automatically stitches together the immense amount of high-resolution video the camera records, and permits wireless control of the camera. "We care a lot about just kickstarting and inspiring the ecosystem as much as we can," said Chris Cox, chief product officer at Facebook. While the company isn't manufacturing or selling the cameras, Cox says the team sees it as a high-end "reference camera" that the rest of the community could base their designs on. According to Cox, making VR video breaks down into three steps: capture, processing, and delivery. Facebook already has a clear advantage in the delivery of this content, so now the plan is to break down the barriers for capture and processing.Also at the conference, Facebook announced it was opening up Live Video feature to developers. This would allow developers to integrate live streaming into third-party apps and also stream from any device.
information be it text, audio, video , etc, are not worth much by themselves.
everyone of us have feeds of them constantly bombarding our brains naturally. to be valuable information need to be edited and focused.
a movie is worth watching only when all the tedious stuff is edited out. truly honest reality show would be boring(without effort). novel that records everything would not be a novel, authors focus(even when they do stream of consciousness). poem or symphony wont be worth much without structure even when some of them impossibly claim to be without structure. etc.
eyes( and ears, other senses, etc ) have evolved to precisely to enable us to extract useful information by focusing within a limited field.
studies have shown very act of editing and structuring information make it useful. for instance taking actual notes of a lecture, help us remember it(even if we do not read notes again ), more than watching a video of the lecture many times.
while expansion of technology is good and should not be curbed, we must be aware that creating streams of information without conscious editing, without focus, will only create ever more worthless useless information.