Facebook Open Sources 360 Surround Camera With Ikea-Style Instructions (techcrunch.com)

Reader joshtops writes: Facebook needs you to fill its News Feed, Oculus Rift, and Gear VR with 360 content. So today it put all the hardware and software designs of its Surround 360 camera on Github after announcing the plan in April. Thanks to cheeky instruction manual inspired by Ikea's manuals, you can learn how to buy the parts, assemble the camera, load the image-stitching software, and start shooting 360 content. Essentially 17 cameras on a UFO-looking stick, the 360 Surround camera can be built for about $30,000 in parts. The 4-megapixel lenses can shoot 4K, 6K, or 8K 360 video, and fisheye lenses on the top and bottom remove the blindspots. Facebook forced a random engineer to try to build the 360 Surround from the open source instructions, and found it took about four hours.FastCompany has more details.

Comments

4-Megapixel Lens?

[Anonymous Coward]

How/why does a lens have megapixels

Re: 4-Megapixel Lens?

[Adriax]

Because they need to pass it through the Gigahertz. Duh.

Re:4-Megapixel Lens?

[TheRealMindChild]

Because underneath them, they have an image sensor, not film

Re:4-Megapixel Lens?

[bjwest]

Lenses are analog so have no pixels at all, unless you count each photon as a pixel.

Re:4-Megapixel Lens?

[by (1706743)]

Although it is entirely possible to have the lens be the limiting factor in terms of resolution (e.g., an 8MP sensor but a "4MP lens" resulting in 8MP images with only 4MP worth of image information).

Of course, that's not at all what was stated...

Re:4-Megapixel Lens?

[Skinkie]

A lens passes light, in some sense it is a filter. The filter passes through information. Typically a lens is qualified in either lines-per-inch of megapixel. How can you check this out yourself? Just make a photo of a subject far away and tell if you can make a distinction between one row of pixels and the adjacent row. Typically the light blends because your sensor is better than the lens. unless you have some very nice (read: $$$) prime lens.

But in another subject. Why is this really news? The Elphel Eyesis 4pi designs are online for 5 years. http://wiki.elphel.com/index.p...

why

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Because it's possible? What does this have to do with FB? Are they going to pay people for their pictures?

why again?

[Anonymous Coward]

They expect someone to spend 30k on a DIY project and then give them the pictures for free? Who thought of this?

Re: why again?

[Adriax]

Bragging rights/advertising for companies and organizations.
This isn't really targeting average Facebook users for their selfie needs.

Re:why again?

[Anonymous Coward]

So Raspberry Pi Zero camera-packs are $40, and they come with an "8 Megapixel Lens".
My math might be bad, but that sounds like under $700 for 17.
Why does a ball and a stick with a FBook logo cost $29,000?

Re: why again?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the same.math that had them value an IM system at $19 billion.

How did they find the random engineer?

[drinkypoo]

Normally all I can find is psuedorandom ones

Re: How did they find the random engineer?

[Adriax]

Math.
And meth.

$30,000

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I guess I can sell a kidney...

Re:$30,000

[Anonymous Coward]

It's gonna cost LOTS more than that. You also need quite a beefy setup to record 17x 4K or better. Then you'll need a TON of post-processing power to do the post-processing, lots of fast storage and all. That's assuming you have a stationary camera, otherwise there's also the equipment that will move the camera. And the VR setup to watch the results.

So you spend upward of $50K, just so you can make facebook money -- there's nothing in it for you.

tongue in cheek

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Facebook has declared text to be dead I'm guessing all the instruction manuals were video only.

Re:tongue in cheek

[magarity]

Since Facebook has declared text to be dead I'm guessing all the instruction manuals were video only.

Have you never seen Ikea instructions? They consist of illustrations of a cartoon figure doing the assembly without any text. It's like a Henry cartoon.

At Facebook HQ:

[Anonymous Coward]

Earlier today: Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech to the employees of Facebook.

"We shall go on to the end. We shall fight privacy in France, we shall fight privacy on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our data collecting, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight privacy on the beaches, we shall fight privacy on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight privacy in the hills; we shall never stop, until the notion of privacy has been eradicated from God's green earth."

Hey, that's pretty quick

[Actually, I do RTFA]

For a series of random actions to produce a device in 4 hours is pretty fast. I wonder how long it would have taken with deliberate actions.

Re:Hey, that's pretty quick

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how long it would have taken with deliberate actions.

Six days. You may rest on the seventh.

Waiting for 3D 360

[SuperKendall]

What I'm really wanting is some kind of 360 #D setup - all of the 360 cameras I know about at the moment just record flat video all around, without any separation required for true 3D playback (as with a VR headset).

Re:Waiting for 3D 360

[swb]

You would think they could have cameras with overlapping fields of view and the software to mask the overlap correctly to provide a stereoscopic effect. Even cardboard videos seem to do this OK.

Re: Waiting for 3D 360

[jsh1972]

I have an LG 360Â camera with two huge fisheyes, one on each side, giving a full 360Â pannable view, including video. Smaller than a pack of cigarettes by about half, 200 bucks, works with other Android, iPhones, etc. SUPPOSED to work with Facebook but haven't tried it yet.

Re: Waiting for 3D 360

[SuperKendall]

Thanks, I'll have to check that out.

Re:Waiting for 3D 360

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out Ozo by Nokia.

Re:Waiting for 3D 360

[Anonymous Coward]

checkout ricoh theta, there are already plenty of available end user handy cameras. im curious when will GoPro release a 360 version

Re: Waiting for 3D 360

[Anonymous Coward]

Facebook has a 360 View application within the Oculus menu system. Just upload images to their server, and they appear in various categories; countries, sunsets, cold, etc...

You can render 360 images using Blender (Cycles render) and view them using Samsung VR Gear and the Oculus Rift menu system. Set the resolution to something like 4096x3072, copy the rendered frames into the Oculus directory / My Images, create the directory if it doesn't exist, then view them through the MyImages directory option.

Duh

[s.petry]

Flux capacitors require them.

Expensive for a DIY project

[Diac]

For $30,000 I would rather buy one of the shelf so if it does not work I can get a refund from someone.

Nice there releasing these plans but would it not be better to try and design one that is more affordable to everyday people?

Minor Labor Issue...

[Anonymous Coward]

So, Facebook wants me to work for them for free, providing content and information they get to keep forever? That doesn't sound like a very good deal. As usual, Facebook can fuck off.

"Facebook needs....."

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"Facebook needs you to fill its News Feed, Oculus Rift, and Gear VR with 360 content."

Like I give a FUCK what Facebook needs.

But anyway, yeah, I'll just get right on that. I'll just run out at lunch and buy $30,000 worth of camera shit so I can help poor little Facebook keep its content flowing.