Best 360 camera/headset combination

unclebob123 · 6 Mar 2017 at 21:28

Hello all,

I am new to this world and I am trying to figure out what is the best 360 video camera and headset combination.

I need something that can be easily viewed back on the fly so ideally no cameras where the videos need stitching.

So far as I can tell there are a few options that look like they could work - Samsung 360 and vuze being two of them, but I have no experience in this area.

Any pointers or advice would be appreciated.

Thanks!

GBRusty · 7 Mar 2017 at 12:29

I started looking at these too and the prices vary widely. From around 80 pounds to several hundred (just like normal cameras, I suppose)
I too would like some practical advice from a VR user.

gandhi · 8 Mar 2017 at 14:26

Is it just video you're looking at? And to what end?

Any camera that claims 4k VR should be viewed with much suspicion. That is a 4k Panorama, so depending on the viewing angle, you're looking at much less than 4k at any one time and as such, a lot of the video really isn't very good quality.

Also depends on budget - If money was not so important, you could look at one of the gopro rigs that uses 6(!) gopros to produce a very high quality 360 video otherwise all the current crop of consumer units are a bit 'meh' for video.

We use VR at work, but only stills and we use;

Ricoh Theta S - Easy to use, but relatively low quality.

Dslr - Needs stitching after

Dslr Stereo rig - needs even more stitching

Matterport camera - Expensive.

A large part of the problem is the stitching camera. It's a fairly intensive process to do it well on still images, so you can imagine how much data a camera is having to churn through to capture and stitch video at 30fps! Whilst mobile phone and other mobile cpu's are now very good, it's still a lot of data.

As for Headsets; Gear VR is the best - simply because it fully co-opts the phones processor, uses extra sensors in the headset and implements the trickery that Oculus uses to smooth out the experience. If you compare it to google cardboard or any of the other "agnostic" headsets, the difference is night and day. You are though, tied into using apps available from the oculus store.

I've not checked out the google offering or really dug into how daydream is better than cardboard, yet.

GBRusty · 9 Mar 2017 at 07:38

That was my first impression of watching a few review videos..the low quality.
I personally want to take still pictures but I assume it suffers from the same problem.
Think I may just plump for the cheaper end of the market anyway.

Oh and I have the daydream and it seems ok, annoying that it only plays daydream apps unless you turn off NFC so I can use the cardboard, but then it also disables any operations so I can't press any buttons.
The vive is so hard to take around with you to show off the photos