Yup. The Ricoh Theta S captures spherical panoramas. The VR terminology is just overselling it. Neat idea though. It would be cool if there was a sonic component.
I think you're on to something. Say we record monaural audio with directional mics on/beside each cam, then encode and compress each stream, allowing for realtime stereo mixing during playback determined by view angle. Add a compass, accelerometer, gyro to track orientation. Couldn't we then achieve the desired effect and even simulate spatial audio effects, 6DoF movement in scene, blend UI sounds and add 3D sound to the environment? AR anyone? With a small peripheral you could emit a few chirps at diff frequencies and measure them using same mic rig to create a virtual map of the environment's acoustic characteristics and use it to render sound effects for composite elements, generated UI, nav feedback, similar to the way image based lighting is used today to make artificially generated objects appear as if they were really present in the scene.
Sounds like a good open hardware/software project but I'm short on cameras and mics for something like that. Anyone see potential there?
Combine with laser rangers and filters for their wavelength on the cams, and you can sample 3d point cloud data too and render the environment as a 3D (4D) scene, use it for composite reference, or slap a small LiDAR scanner under the whole thing for precise measurement.
Sounds like a good open hardware/software project but I'm short on cameras and mics for something like that. Anyone see potential there?
Combine with laser rangers and filters for their wavelength on the cams, and you can sample 3d point cloud data too and render the environment as a 3D (4D) scene, use it for composite reference, or slap a small LiDAR scanner under the whole thing for precise measurement.