So I was looking at one of Gordon Ramsay’s 360 Degree Videos on Facebook; something about a Christmas Dinner special with one of his daughters. I actually had a hard time figuring out where exactly Gordon was or what he was cooking. I finally did manage to locate him and his daughter, but that’s not what you would expect from a 360 video, right?
When Google Cardboard came out, there were a lot of events where people gave out Google Cardboards, in an attempt to push the Google Cardboards into the main frame of the VR world. People were instantly hooked; a simple headset that could instantly convert your ordinary smartphone experience into a comprehensive Virtual experience where the world interacted according to the way you behaved. Maybe it’s bad SEO or hasty assumptions but everything you see using the Google cardboard is not virtual reality, trust me on that one.
Virtual reality is a computer-generated simulation of the environment that makes you feel like you’ve teleported to that environment through your headsets or gear. A true VR experience would include having 3D life-sized images (from the user’s perspective) and the ability to track the user’s motions so as to adjust the display as the user keeps moving. This is typical true VR immersive simulated experience criteria. This does not happen with 360 videos.
What is a 360 Degree Video?
360 videos or the 360 degree videos are just videos that capture a particular environment in a whole 360 degree environment. So it can seem immersive, but they’re really not. All they do is give you a panoramic view of whatever is captured in the video. You cannot travel with it and are restricted to what is captured in the video. Imagine you’re watching a 360 video of the Avatar world. What you’re viewing from somewhere near the sacred tree, you can also view from the hills because there’s only so much a 360 video can capture. So you can experience the same scenery from two places which don’t really virtualize your reality. It’s like watching the same movie at two places except you’re getting a full 360 degree view of it which just makes you feel like you’re immersed in it. But then again, one can even be immersed while reading a good book. We don’t call that virtual reality now, do we?
Understand The basic VR rules
The fundamental rule that virtual reality is based on is that you never take control of the camera away from the user. Your environment must change only while considering the orientation and position of your head. If you’re looking in one direction constantly but your frame keeps changing, the basic rule of VR is broken. This also causes motion sickness and other ill-effects. 360 videos do not meet the accurate an acceptable frame, latency or field of view which is what causes these ill-effects, also called as cybersickness.
How true VR headsets work?
What these headsets like Oculus rift and HTC Vive do are they track the movements of your head with a number of sensors and then they map the actual real-world movement of your head to the virtual word. So if you change the orientation of your head, say you tilt it slightly towards the left, the embedded computer system in your headsets will map the same tilt in the virtual world which ultimately makes you feel like you’re transported into the virtual world. As simple as it sounds in theory, the execution and implementation isn’t. Here comes the problem with 360 videos. They cannot show you more than one perspective at a time. You can get up and walk around and jump about but you will be watching the same frames. The hardware doesn’t detect your movements. Also, the high frame rates and faulty display timings tend to give you a nauseating feeling or a headache which doesn’t stop as soon as you take off the gear.
What is Augmented reality?
Here’s where virtual reality and 360 videos meet. It’s a little opposite of the way VR works. It makes computer generated objects pop into your real world. You would probably see characters from video games popping up from behind your office desk with guns and ammo or real life 3d information. This is the common ground for virtual reality and 360 videos. Otherwise, calling 360 videos as VR is only a setback for VR.
Why are 360 Degree Video a setback for VR?
Virtual reality is a fast growing industry. It is not only being implemented in gaming but also in social networking. The Facebook virtual reality is the next big thing in the field of VR. It gives people an escape into a stress-free virtual world, it gives you the chance to be at two places at the same time, it provides you with a creative control and helps you define objects that don’t really exist. VR is a combination of various technologies. It has a lot of potentials to shape up the future.
With huge companies investing large sums of money into the virtual reality industry and with all the research put in for the betterment and improvement of VR gear, calling a 360 degree video which can probably be shot using the bare minimum technology (as compared to VR technology) would only be a setback for the marketing of VR as rising business. The business is trying to show the people that VR is what the world is heading to, that it is the future. Virtual reality is paving the way to a space-age world and hence, categorizing 360 videos under virtual reality would defeat the point of good marketing. Technology is moving at a fast pace and is slowly blurring the line between reality and virtual reality. However, Virtual Reality is still far from perfected, the scope is immense and there is a reason the big players are investing so much into it.
“Virtual reality was once a dream of science but the internet was also once a dream and so were smartphones and computers.” - Mark Zuckerberg
When Google Cardboard came out, there were a lot of events where people gave out Google Cardboards, in an attempt to push the Google Cardboards into the main frame of the VR world. People were instantly hooked; a simple headset that could instantly convert your ordinary smartphone experience into a comprehensive Virtual experience where the world interacted according to the way you behaved. Maybe it’s bad SEO or hasty assumptions but everything you see using the Google cardboard is not virtual reality, trust me on that one.
Virtual reality is a computer-generated simulation of the environment that makes you feel like you’ve teleported to that environment through your headsets or gear. A true VR experience would include having 3D life-sized images (from the user’s perspective) and the ability to track the user’s motions so as to adjust the display as the user keeps moving. This is typical true VR immersive simulated experience criteria. This does not happen with 360 videos.
What is a 360 Degree Video?
360 videos or the 360 degree videos are just videos that capture a particular environment in a whole 360 degree environment. So it can seem immersive, but they’re really not. All they do is give you a panoramic view of whatever is captured in the video. You cannot travel with it and are restricted to what is captured in the video. Imagine you’re watching a 360 video of the Avatar world. What you’re viewing from somewhere near the sacred tree, you can also view from the hills because there’s only so much a 360 video can capture. So you can experience the same scenery from two places which don’t really virtualize your reality. It’s like watching the same movie at two places except you’re getting a full 360 degree view of it which just makes you feel like you’re immersed in it. But then again, one can even be immersed while reading a good book. We don’t call that virtual reality now, do we?
Understand The basic VR rules
The fundamental rule that virtual reality is based on is that you never take control of the camera away from the user. Your environment must change only while considering the orientation and position of your head. If you’re looking in one direction constantly but your frame keeps changing, the basic rule of VR is broken. This also causes motion sickness and other ill-effects. 360 videos do not meet the accurate an acceptable frame, latency or field of view which is what causes these ill-effects, also called as cybersickness.
How true VR headsets work?
What these headsets like Oculus rift and HTC Vive do are they track the movements of your head with a number of sensors and then they map the actual real-world movement of your head to the virtual word. So if you change the orientation of your head, say you tilt it slightly towards the left, the embedded computer system in your headsets will map the same tilt in the virtual world which ultimately makes you feel like you’re transported into the virtual world. As simple as it sounds in theory, the execution and implementation isn’t. Here comes the problem with 360 videos. They cannot show you more than one perspective at a time. You can get up and walk around and jump about but you will be watching the same frames. The hardware doesn’t detect your movements. Also, the high frame rates and faulty display timings tend to give you a nauseating feeling or a headache which doesn’t stop as soon as you take off the gear.
What is Augmented reality?
Here’s where virtual reality and 360 videos meet. It’s a little opposite of the way VR works. It makes computer generated objects pop into your real world. You would probably see characters from video games popping up from behind your office desk with guns and ammo or real life 3d information. This is the common ground for virtual reality and 360 videos. Otherwise, calling 360 videos as VR is only a setback for VR.
Why are 360 Degree Video a setback for VR?
Virtual reality is a fast growing industry. It is not only being implemented in gaming but also in social networking. The Facebook virtual reality is the next big thing in the field of VR. It gives people an escape into a stress-free virtual world, it gives you the chance to be at two places at the same time, it provides you with a creative control and helps you define objects that don’t really exist. VR is a combination of various technologies. It has a lot of potentials to shape up the future.
With huge companies investing large sums of money into the virtual reality industry and with all the research put in for the betterment and improvement of VR gear, calling a 360 degree video which can probably be shot using the bare minimum technology (as compared to VR technology) would only be a setback for the marketing of VR as rising business. The business is trying to show the people that VR is what the world is heading to, that it is the future. Virtual reality is paving the way to a space-age world and hence, categorizing 360 videos under virtual reality would defeat the point of good marketing. Technology is moving at a fast pace and is slowly blurring the line between reality and virtual reality. However, Virtual Reality is still far from perfected, the scope is immense and there is a reason the big players are investing so much into it.
“Virtual reality was once a dream of science but the internet was also once a dream and so were smartphones and computers.” - Mark Zuckerberg
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