Friday, May 06, 2005

My ghetto 360° video experiment

Inspired by this previous Video Thing post about panoramic video, here's my incredibly lo-fi DIY attempt.



Old plastic Christmas tree bauble I found in the garden the other day
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Felt tip pen
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Blu Tak
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"Polar Coordinates" distortion in After Effects
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1.1mb mpeg4 test clip!


EDIT - now also on Youtube! :)



It's decidedly fuzzy, and my demo isn't exactly spectacular as the camera was tethered to capture card and power supply, (battery dead & couldn't be bothered to find a blank tape) but works much better than I thought it would! Exciting results for such a half-baked attempt.

I'm going to build a more robust and high quality version (ie get a better mirror ball!) some time soon.

Oh, and by the time I took the above photo of my setup it had gone a bit wonkey, but I did have the ball lined up with the lens much better than it looks there!

39 comments:

Wiley said...

You are the fucking MacGuyver of Video, sir. I salute you.

Wiley said...

Ok, so here's what we do- we build a higer-end rig to shoot in 360 degrees, then we invent a 360 projection system that rear-projects to a circular screen with the viewer in the middle.

Then we shoot a whole movie. Something like Jodorowsky's "Holy Mountain"... but maybe 5 or 6 hours long. Then you tie your audience up, force feed them drug laced jello, and then put them in the middle.

BTW, I am the audience.

cemenTIMental said...

:D Great idea!!! :)

Rob said...

My friend and business partner of sorts has a nifty custom rig for multiple screen cylindrical projection. It's a neat piece, the 'room' (comprised of 9 screens) revolves at a constant speed while the sun breaks the horizon in all the spaces simultaneously.

Point being is that some sort of multi channel system could capture this kind of thing pretty well.

At any rate, the test looks awesome! I'm glad to see someone finally do it.

Rob said...

Marco's (my friends) piece is on display at SFMoma for a little while.

http://www.sfmoma.org/exhibitions/exhib_detail.asp?id=134

Rob said...

Gaar.

Here's the more descriptive link:

http://www.sfmoma.org/press/
pressroom.asp?id=237&do=exhibitions

cemenTIMental said...

thanks...

that installation sounds great!

Another interesting use of this technology might be to make Quicktime VR type movies, but with video instead of a still... so you could film a scene in 360 and then the viewer could pan around as if they were there, compose their own shot, choose which character to follow, etc....
An endless loop would work well for this maybe...

Dunno if QTVR can inherently use video instead of a still image or not...?

Wiley said...

I saw a quicktime VR with video, it was a short clip of a circle of people drinking beer. It was a loop.

Anonymous said...

veeeery nice indeed

Anonymous said...

damn u da man, freakin genius!

cemenTIMental said...

Thanks all!

Lots of hits presumably from Make have been thrashing my bandwidth so I've changed the movie link to a Coral cache... hope it still works ok...

Anonymous said...

Omni-directional vision using a camera and a curved lens is part of a field called catadioptrics. You can find more information at this site: http://madhava.math.drexel.edu/~ahicks/

Anonymous said...

Excellent hack. It's prompted a lot of discussion on the net about DIY VR.

Anonymous said...

Ok, i'm making my own tomorrow! ^^

Anonymous said...

I knew this was possible! Glad to see a successful result with it (I haven't tried it yet) :D

Anonymous said...

Hi there:

My buddy Daniel Maurer has a Weblog of his panoramic video excursions...

Enjoy!

http://www.360movies.de/

Patrick
http://cheathamlane.net

Anonymous said...

Wiley said...

You are the fucking MacGuyver of Video, sir. I salute you.


Amen to that! Brilliant

Anonymous said...

Actually, just a thought about the projection comment above. If you leave out the Adobe AfterEffects stage, and simply project the video vertically onto a spherical mirror, the panorama will magically reappear in-the-round. Now to go find a nice, big, high-quality spherical mirror and high-power projector :-)

Garrett lynch said...

maybe useful
http://www.vrhotwires.com/InexpensivePanoramicVideo.html

Anonymous said...

i tried this but it didnt work out, what are the settings you used in after effects?

my email is jonsimo@flipsidevideo.com
thanks bud!

Anonymous said...

uhmm, how is that 360? isnt that just 180?

smok3

cemenTIMental said...

uhmm, how is that 360? isnt that just 180?
Uh... how isn't it 360!?

Yeah it's 360, not 180... well to be honest more like 350 or something as i had to loose a little bit at the edges to crop out the pen that holds the mirrorball... if i could find a good way to support it from the centre of the lens like the commercially available pano reflectors then could get true 360, and even digitally pan around in postproduction!

Anonymous said...

really interesting idea,
tnx for sharing!!!

nannuz

Anonymous said...

Hiya,

nice post!
I've been trying to recreate what do did, but haven't been able to achieve similar results. I found, after applying the Polar Coordinates filter in AE, the left half of the image was inverted vertically (so on the right was my face and the camera lens, and on the left where my legs and feet, but pointing upwards).

Any idea what I might have been doing wrong?

cemenTIMental said...

Uh holding the camera horizontally instead of vertically?

xumb said...

hello how's everybody doing? just found this page and i wanna say kudos to the author for putting up one of the coolest video tricks ever made! i'm ready to make my own, but is there any plugin/effect equivalent to polar coordinates for sony vegas?

Anonymous said...

I saw your awesome instant panoramic camera hack, and hope you’ll share how you made it with us at Instructables.com for the chance to win a $15,000 Universal VersaLaser laser cutter.
[http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Enter-the-Instructables-and-Universal-Laser/]

Any project is eligible for the contest- just show our judges you’ve built something awesome and creative, and you could win the VersaLaser or some of our other great prizes. (Your project doesn’t need to be laser-related – that’s just what you win!)

Sharing your project on Instructables.com is a great way to get your projects (both old and new!) more widely known on the web, link back to your own site, and meet other smart people who love your work. We have over 2 million readers each month, including editors of all the big blogs and magazines, and your project could be a big hit.

I’m looking forward to seeing your how-to up on Instructables! The deadline has been extended to January 1, so post your project soon.
Let me know if you run into any problems or questions in the process, and good luck in the Laser Cutter contest.

Best,

Matt
Instructables Intern
http://www.instructables.com/member/bofthem/
(and the rest of the Instructables team)

McJanus said...

The way you do this 360° is simply great! I'm really impressed by your designing skills ;)

I start this loOong quest of 360° panoramic video... after years of immersive picture!

If you wanna see some 360 pictures and 360 videos, check out my blog or
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z5tQITRH2g

Panoramically yours ;)
JM
360 Photographer in Geneva, Switzerland

Anonymous said...

That is a great hack. I'm looking forward to seeing what more can be done with the design concept.

There are some amazing 360 videos that Red Bull just put out that have a navigation feature in the player. Better yet - the camera is on the back of a pro surfer inside the barrel of a monster wave. Immersive video has come! Embed codes are in the lower right corner. http://www.redbullsurfing.com/videos/immersive/

Anonymous said...

I love the song playing in the background. What's the name of that band? How did you get your arms to grow so long?

Anonymous said...

Great site...I adding it to my desktop.

Michael said...

A couple of thoughts: A much larger mirror ball (maybe 10" or so) or maybe one of those mirror domes they use for security cameras would show fewer optical defects since any defects would be spread over a larger area of mirror. Also now that so many cheap cameras have 720p hd video, getting decent quality video would be much easier. you could use 2 16:9 hd cameras bottom to bottom which would give you an almost square very high rez image when you stitched the two camera's footage together.

Wiley said...

Not to mention that now you could use processing (http://processing.org) to de-polar co-ordinate the video live pretty easily. It may be time to revisit this project.

Anonymous said...

most people in the ghetto don't have a video camera good enough to stream to their PC or a PC or a capture card...this is more middle class "home brew." looks good too!

Anonymous said...

So does anyone know if it it possible to project the video in the sphere, with the viewer standing in the middle and the video is all around? do u think its possible to make it into 3d( like in IMAX with 3d glasses)??

Unknown said...

No need to be so getto nowadays. Just come buy our 360 lens and use our video software. !!!!

www.pano-pro.com

cemenTIMental said...

Looks good but that's still $595 more expensive than my version :)

Panograf said...

remainds me my work and the beginning in 2006
;-)
http://www.youtube.com/user/panograf
now, for example, immersive here:
city-views.tv/attempto

panoramic photo stitching said...

Great stuff!
Thanks.

Regards,
panorama stitching