360 degree camera

[AJWhite1970]

Can someone recommend a cheap and cheerful 360 degree camera? Got a one off project that needs to take a few views but don't want to be spending £500 on a camera that will then sit in a cupboard for ages...

 

Thanks in advance

Andrew

[FN-GM]

How much is cheap?

 

These are supposed to be quite good, as used by Casey Neistat - https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Camera-Photo/Samsung-C200N-360-Gear-VR-White/B01M4J53CO

[dhicks]

Can someone recommend a cheap and cheerful 360 degree camera? Got a one off project that needs to take a few views but don't want to be spending £500 on a camera that will then sit in a cupboard for ages...

 

Still images or video? If still images, and if the scene you're taking a picture of doesn't involve too many moving objects (people / vehicles) then the "photosphere" feature on a mobile phone is generally pretty good. For best results place the phone on a tripod with a head that rotates around the camera lens - you can buy them, or cobble something together out of bits of Lego and gaffer tape.

 

If video, how "360" does your video need to be? I use a Kodak SP360 4k, with a 235-degree field of view. That's two-thirds of a sphere, and if whatever is behind the camera isn't changing a great deal anyway you can cheat and simply paste in a still photo (or even a video from the same camera turned through 180 degrees). The quality of the results you'll get from two Kodak SP360's back-to-back depends on the software you are using - getting good stitching results proves to be tricky. The current consumer-end all-in-one solutions haven't got great reviews - they are all limited resolution or have stitching issues.

 

As this is for a one-off, you could hire a camera. Until very recently this would have been quite expensive anyway, but as of this week you might be able to get hold of an Orah 4i, they are now shipping in Europe. Previous "pro" cameras started from around £20,000, but this one is around £3,500, so hiring one for a couple of days might be quite affordable.

 

If you simply want to buy a cheap 360 degree camera, the Ricoh Theta is meant to be pretty good. Lower resolution, but does seem to produce pretty good results, and is very portable and easy to use.

[dry]

Can someone recommend a cheap and cheerful 360 degree camera? Got a one off project that needs to take a few views but don't want to be spending £500 on a camera that will then sit in a cupboard for ages...

 

Thanks in advance

Andrew

 

I'd be half tempted to take the pictures on a regular camera and stitch them together using Photoshop if it's only a few you're doing and it's a static scene. I did this as part of my Photography A Level final project and the results were good. Heck, as part of it I took pictures on 35mm film camera, got them developed and printed and stuck them on photo mount myself to make a 360 view!

[gpjt]

£299 i believe

 

https://theta360.com/en/

 

or

 

LG 360 CAM | 360 Camera for G5 | LG UK

Edited March 20, 2017 by gpjt

[dhicks]

Can someone recommend a cheap and cheerful 360 degree camera?

 

Ooh - the new Samsung Gear 360 (2017) is now out. I bought one from the Samsung store on Oxford Street last night - it seems to still be listed as "pre-order" on Amazon, so stocks might not have arrived in other places yet. It certainly seems easy enough to use so far - press the button on the front, it starts recording, and of course the video frames are synced. Both frames are recorded as simple what-comes-from-the-lenses views side-by-side on a single video file, a 4096 x 2048 .mp4 file encoded as H.265. Theoretically, that's a 4K video file, although you loose some detail from overlapping areas and the fact that the lenses are round, so there's black areas around the frames. Samsung provide software to split the .mp4 file into two 2048 x 2048 images and stitch them back together in 4096 x 2048 equirectangular projection. It's okay, but I want to try and figure out how to split the video files in half myself so I can use different stitching software - I'm guessing a combination of ffmpeg filters should sort it.

[dhicks]

It certainly seems easy enough to use so far

 

Okay, impressed - updated my (home) laptop to Windows 10 1703 (Creators Update), double-clicked a equirectangular-projection .mp4 file and Windows automatically played it in a 360-degree capable viewer.

[TomFreeman]

Sorry to bring back an old thread but our Computer Science Department are looking to buy some 360 video cameras and some software so they can create some content with 'Triggers' in, they obviously want the footage to be HD which the ricoh cameras seem to come out top on all the reviews for but i'm struggling to find the software aspects.

 

Anybody found anything?

[dhicks]

Sorry to bring back an old thread but our Computer Science Department are looking to buy some 360 video cameras and some software so they can create some content with 'Triggers' in, they obviously want the footage to be HD which the ricoh cameras seem to come out top on all the reviews for but i'm struggling to find the software aspects.

 

What do you mean by a "trigger"? Is the whole bit of content to be VR / 360 degree video, or are you talking about some kind of menu system that lets the users play some 36-degree content?

[TomFreeman]

They're studying the Cambridge National Technicals, the wording in there states that they need to:

 

Be able to create a virtual or augmented reality resource:

3.1. Develop, i.e.:• create the trigger points of interest• create the layer(s)/overlay(s)

[dhicks]

3.1. Develop, i.e.:• create the trigger points of interest• create the layer(s)/overlay(s)

 

You can use WebVR to define a hotspot within a 360-degree video (or photo), and define whatever action you'd like to take place when the user interacts with that hotspot. Is that going to help, or are they after a more point-and-click sort of solution?

[TomFreeman]

Oh ok thank you very much, we'll have a look at that.