AppleInsider Staff
Extreme sports aficionados will soon have an official GoPro answer for capturing 360-degree spherical video and still images of their adventures, as the action cam company has finally taken the covers off of its new "Omni" rig.
Omni appears to be GoPro's in-house answer to the burgeoning virtual reality recording market, which it first entered in a tie-up with Google last year. GoPro's version uses six of the company's Hero4 Black cameras in a custom cube-like housing.
GoPro says that it has developed special technology that allows for "pixel-level synchronization" between all six cameras. The company has yet to explain that technology in more detail, but it's likely designed to reduce the amount of post-processing required to get a usable spherical video.
Pricing has yet to be announced, but the Omni will almost assuredly come in at a lower cost than the $15,000 Odyssey unit that's designed to work with Google's Jump platform. The Odyssey uses 16 Hero4 Black cameras.
GoPro will show off the new Omni unit at this month's NAB show in Las Vegas, where pricing and availability will likely be confirmed.
Malcolm Owen
Amber Neely
Christine McKee
Chip Loder
Marko Zivkovic
8 Comments
These guys have had a bunch of 360 GoPro mounts for a while (including 3D rigs):
http://shop.360heros.com/category-s/1817.htm
(I am not affiliated with them in any way).
There are better cameras from Jaunt VR which has global shutter and eliminates issues like rolling shutter and is full stereo
cinematic VR. 16 cameras around, 4 up and 4 down. Using the camera array to give left and right eye binocular disparity.
https://www.jauntvr.com/technology/
The Omni from GoPro is okay, but there is another camera from Nikon Keymission 360 which is ruggedized and water resistant and smaller.
Then there is the Samsung Gear 360 camera too.
Here's to hoping that battery life will be more than 17 minutes.
EVERYONE has had their Hero camera go dark 17 minutes into a mountain bike ride due to low battery. It does about 1% of what an iPhone does, yet can barely get any decent battery life.
Maybe GoPro should spend more on hiring battery engineers, not rockabilly surf braaahs into Big Head Todd and the Monsters in the marketing and sales departments.