Discussion with a Rifter

[Mharz]

Wanted to share a quick story about a discussion I had with a guy I ran into the other night while I was out and about.

I see this guy and his kid walking about looking at mobile phones and he's wearing Google Glass.  Being the techie nerd I am, I walk up and ask him about his experiences with Glass.  He enjoys it and all that but we get to talking about the Rift.

Turns out, he works for some media company as an IT nerd and one of their concept ideas is Rift enabled live stream concerts.  Basically the concept is they deploy a few CCD camera arrays that are very small at locations around and on the stage during live performances.  They're very small (small tripod sized) and the camera array is supposed to capture nearly everything in a 360 degree field of view with +/- 90 degrees vertical.

They stream all these images, sync them somehow, and produce a Riftable concert experience so that nerds like us could sit at home and watch a concert in London and get a full view of all the action.  Add the music and it's like you're almost there.  Apparently the CCD camera tech they're using has the ability to zoom as well on demand so you could in theory zoom in on the drummer and watch him play during your favorite song.

It's still in the early stages but he was really optimistic about it.

Mind = Blown.

Suddenly the raging capitalist in me starts to think of how many tickets you could sell to anyone, anywhere in the world so long as they had a Rift and headphones.  You could almost get the same concert experience (sans that pot smoking drunk two rows in front of you) and never have to leave your house.

After he told me the story and how excited he was I asked him if they ever thought about pitching to the NFL or maybe UFC for fight nights.  His answer was vague but he said that's a really good idea.

I'm sure you all have some thoughts.  Feel free to comment as I'd love to hear them.

[Tbone]

The general mentality of Oculus is that gaming will be the first step, but that VR will quickly become the common way to do many non-gaming things. I've heard the live concert idea tossed around a lot, and Oculus hints that there are a lot of companies working on a lot of these non-gaming applications.

In terms of actual 360 3D video in the Rift, I've tried a few (there aren't many). One issue I've noticed is stitching. Essentially, if using a stationary camera, they basically use several cameras and stitch the videos together. Where the videos meet, you can notice it quite easily.

It sounds like the guy you talked to is focusing on doing something like a multiple-Kinect feed. I don't know if you've seen the videos, but using just two Kinect cameras, you can basically create a virtual 3D model of the space with textures from the video feed in real time. The result is a 3D streaming environment that you can move around in. With enough cameras, I imagine this being the best approach to this sort of technology.

Here's a video of the technology in its early stages. This Doc_Ok guy is a genius and has a lot of really cool VR videos.

http://youtu.be/5-w7UXCAUJE