Cameras?

It’s impossible for us to create a video showing you all the different cameras available for 360 video, without it being outdated almost immediately, so what we’re going to do is just take a look at a few examples of cameras, discuss their differences and differences in price.

There are basically 3 tiers of 360 cameras

1. Consumer level
2. “Prosumer” level
3. Professional level

While it’s unlikely that you would have access to a professional level camera now, it’s quite possible that you might use one in your future VR career. Right now, most of the consumer cameras, and some of the higher grade cameras are monoscopic. That means when you play back the video in a VR headset, both eyes see the same exact image. In effect, any resulting image feels quite flat - like you’re seeing every object at the same depth, projected onto a sphere around you.

A stereoscopic camera instead, has two lenses side by side, which allows you to then play a slightly different image in each eye, something which feels more natural to the viewer, since it mimics how we view the world in reality. While it still won’t feel as real as something with 6 degrees of freedom, a stereoscopic camera does improve the feeling of depth and presence.

There can be issues though - if stereo isn’t filmed or displayed correctly for your eyes, it may give you a major headache or simulator sickness, and there’s currently no way to fix the errors you would experience if you leaned your head to the left or right.