Virtual reality is set to take over the tech world in an expansive way, and with that should come more expansive video — people want to capture footage in 360 degrees.
Thankfully, a Kickstarter campaign for a 360-degree video camera has been successfully funded. The camera is called the Sphericam 2, and it allows users to capture everything around them at high definition without having any blind spots.
"Most cinematic VR creation attempts so far have been, well, less real and more virtual. Think blind spots, uneven stitching and mismatched white balance from unsynchronised sensors," said Jeffrey Martin, the creator of Sphericam 2, on the Kickstarter page.
"There just aren't many people who want to go through the months of training required to operate 6 sports cameras stuck together, and the tremendous amount of tricky post processing that is needed to make such footage watchable."
The Sphericam 2 aims to remedy this problem — and on paper, it certainly seems up to the task. Featuring the ability to capture video at 60 frames per second in a whopping 4K, the Sphericam 2 is not skimping out on video quality. This is, of course, much more important for something like virtual reality, in which any lack of quality can hugely diminish the realism of a given scene.
For those who don't want to handle such big files, however, there are other options. Users can choose to instead record video at 30fps, and there are a few different video compression options, too.
Sphericam 2 is also very portable, being about the size of a tennis ball. It features a total of six cameras, which work together to capture the world around the device. Not only that, but it also has WiFi and video streaming capabilities, allowing users to view video, start and stop recording, and transfer files through a smartphone app.
The "2" in the name suggests that there must have been a Sphericam 1, which there was. The original Sphericam was funded in 2012, featuring four cameras and a built-in monitor to view what's being captured as it's being captured. Because of this, however, the device was quite bulky — unlike its tennis ball-shaped successor.
While the Sphericam 2 has already been funded, the campaign still has 22 days to go — so would-be users can get their own at the Kickstarter page. To order a Sphericam 2, you'll have to front up a good $1,399 – and those pledges are available in limited quantities – after which the device will cost $1,499.
