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JauntONE capturing a baseball game

There has been a lot of attending paid recently to several excellent new rigs for capturing high-quality 360-degree stereo video — especially the open-source Facebook Surroundings 360. But VR-leader Jaunt still has what may be the all-time rig in production. Featuring 24 synchronized, global-shutter cameras and a lot of proprietary back-terminate software, Jaunt has used its own Studio arm to create some of the highest-quality VR videos available. At present, Jaunt is making its photographic camera rigs and access to its back-terminate processing pipeline available to others.

Starting next month, Radiant Images volition begin renting Jaunt ONE rigs, and access to the needed post-processing tools that exercise the image processing, stitching, and generate stereo views. We haven't heard exact pricing nevertheless, but the company says the rental fees volition be in line with other, similar rigs. Since the Jaunt ONE is assumed to cost over $100K, don't await the rental to be low enough for hobbyists or amateurs, but for anyone needing to capture an event or film a curt project, renting is often a proficient alternative.

Why high-end VR capture rigs are expensive

The space age design of Facebook's Surround 360 is deceptively simple structurallyWith consumer-grade 360-degree cameras like the very-usable Ricoh Theta Due south costing less than $400, information technology'due south natural to wonder why high-end rigs price more than a hundred times as much. For starters, to get the needed 6K or 8K video resolution, y'all need expensive sensors — especially since tricky lighting means they need to each have high dynamic range. Then, to run up them together and generate stereo views, information technology is really helpful for those cameras to have global shutters (then the entire frame is captured at once). Otherwise you hazard a lot of artifacts.

To make those stereo views realistic at every viewing angle, you lot also need a lot of cameras (Facebook's rig has 17, Jaunt'due south has 24). On elevation of that, the cameras must be perfectly synchronized, and include the hardware to capture and read out a huge corporeality of video. Many rigs, including the Jaunt ONE, also include an assortment of microphones that capture 360-degree sound fields.

Until recently, high-end VR production studios well-nigh all designed their own capture rigs. That will notwithstanding be the case for many studios. But betwixt the open up-source Facebook Surround 360 rig and the commercial availability of systems like the Samsung Odyssey and the Nokia Ozo, as well as availability for rent of rigs like the Jaunt One, many studios will exist able to get out of the hardware business and concentrate on content creation.