At the F8 developer conference held some time ago, Facebook announced the design of an open source 360-degree video recording system for producing high-quality 3D video called Surround 360. Facebook plans to make the design specifications and image-merging technology available on GitHub this summer, so that make it easy for VR content creators to access the tools they need to create high-quality content.
Facebook Surround 360 contains a lineup of 17 cameras and web-based software that allows it to record 360-degree images and then combine them into a 3D landscape. The 17 cameras consist of 14 wide-angle cameras mounted on a horizontal ring on the body, while the other 3 cameras are fisheye cameras, 1 mounted on the top and the rest mounted on the bottom.
All of these fisheye cameras allow Surround 360 to produce circular images and the two cameras on the bottom are intentionally installed to remove the camera stand so that they are not visible in the resulting 3D image. All cameras on this device use a global shutter instead of a roll shutter to ensure the distraction caused by closing each shutter doesn’t appear in the image.
Facebook says Surround 360 can be used for hours continuously without overheating and can produce video recording up to 8K. The recorded video can be viewed using VR headsets such as the Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR or on ordinary screens such as smartphones, tablets, and PCs.
Surround 360 is not the first camera designed to record stereoscopic 3D video. Previously there was a $15,000 GoPro Odyssey, a $60,000 Nokia Ozo, and even a $350 Ricoh Theta S.