GoPro’s Spherical Camera Mount Will Take Us A Step Closer To The Virtual Reality Market
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Since Facebook's Oculus subsidiary has been making some steady progress in the field of virtual reality, many other companies have now started venturing into this market as well. At the Code Conference, GoPro CEO Nick Woodman revealed that the company would be launching a spherical camera mount that has been created to record footage for VR experiences.
"When Facebook dropped the gauntlet and acquired Oculus, it sent a message that, ok there's going to be heavy development and investment in virtual reality," Woodman said.
This news comes along with GoPro announcing another mount created together with Google – the16-camera rig designed to work in integration with Google Jump. The action camera company also cleared the rumors by officially announcing their consumer drone series that will be releasing in the first half of 2016 and their newest camera, the Hero+ LCD.
Features and design
Talking about the design of the spherical camera mount, Woodman says, "Multicamera enables spherical content.” The mount is in the shape of a ball will feature a setting to hold 6 Hero 4 cameras that can be arranged in different directions.
The multiple cameras will capture footage, which will be interweaved together using Kolor, a VR software company that was recently acquired by GoPro. This knitting together of the videos will result in a unified imagery that can be viewed using VR headsets like the Oculus Rift, Google Cardboard and Microsoft HoloLens. You will be able to watch the resulting content on websites like YouTube 360.
There was no pricing information given about the mount at the moment, but Woodman did say that it will be releasing sometime later this year.
Check out some sample footage shot using the GoPro mount:
