image courtesy: NextVR
NextVR Adds Full Movement Freedom To Future Broadcasts
Orange County based NextVR announced at CES that the company will be using its cameras to capture reality that would enable viewer to move around in the scene.
NextVR has been a leader in VR broadcast of live sporting events like NFL and NBA. The company broadcasted presidential debates directly to VR headsets.
Current state of 360 videos does not allow a person to move around, rather the feel of being tied to a pole. It will be super exciting to see the company utilize their experience of cutting-edge capturing technology integrated with 6 degrees of freedom in future event broadcasts.
Since launch, the company has focus its efforts on mobile VR platforms such as Samsung Gear VR, and Daydream. Only recently the company introduced support for 6DoF hardware in the form of Windows MR and PlayStation VR applications back.
image courtesy: NextVR
NextVR is planning to release new content captured with sex degrees of freedom starting starting this year. The roll-out will start with on-demand content with eventually move onto live streams. The new improvement to enable user to walk around in a scene shot in VR will be a huge upgrade for the company.
With 6DoF, user can move forward, backward, left, right, up, and down, allowing the person to shift perspective in a pre-recorded scene as if they were experiencing it live. User can crouch, move shoulders, or even take full steps while the software technology used to edit the video takes into account the natural shift in perspective those movements involve.
VR games, in which the images a player sees is simulated by software, naturally have 6DoF so long as the headset tracks the head and body. This is typically done either through an internal or external tracking mechanism involving a mix of lasers, cameras, and sensors. For live scenes,
6DoF requires the video be captured with multi-camera rig that records multiple shots of simultaneous streams of a scene. Stitching software is then used to combine multiple streams into a single virtual reality video.
2018 is said to be the year of VR 2.0, and is looking to shape ip to be a big year for Next VR. The arrival new standalone headsets from companies such as Oculus, HTC, Pico, and Lenovo could help the company grow significantly.
