Vrography I Recently Got to Thinking Whats Next

VRography?

I recently got to thinking what’s next in photography?

I’m aware of the gigapan idea, basically making a monster panorama by stitching together many photos. I enjoyed my iPhone’s panorama mode last summer during my drive to Alaska. I’m intrigued by videography, but not in a story teller fashion. I remember my first work computer was an SGI Indy with CrystalEyes 3D glasses. So combine all of these and you have something I’ve been interested in lately. Call it 360° 3D panos, spherical photos/videos, virtual reality, there’s not even really a widely accepted label for a photograph (or video) that basically captures your entire environment in 3D. At NAB I saw the Google Jump video with a GoPro array and thought, hey, I have some GoPros let me try this. So I lasercut a holder for the GoPros and did some experiments.

The idea for this config is that the front 2 cameras (bottom in the above photo) would capture a stereo view while the others would provide the environment, albeit not in stereo. What I noticed was that generally I’m shooting something with a center of interest where I want the biggest stereo effect. That leads to my first obstacle in VRography, center of interest. In regular photography I look for something interest to point my camera at. In VRography I need to find a viewpoint that is interesting in every direction. In landscape photography what is behind the camera is generally not as great as what the camera is pointing at (think Glacier Point in Yosemite!)

Next post I’ll put up some examples and explain version 2 of my GoPro array.