Re: [liborjanicek] #360 Video - Wingsuit BASE Jump - Miles Daisher - Monte Brento, Italy
Quite a few years back i was approached by my former boss who runs a movie special effects company in London regarding a 360 degree camera. He'd spent ten's of thousands of dollars on a state-of-the-art all-singing all-dancing camera unit and wanted to showcase it with what he thought would be a spectaclular and 'immersive' experience for the viewer. So i flew out to Switzerland with Dan the Man to shoot some footage using a 360 camera. The whole setup was extremely bulky, heavy and cumbersome which prohibited him wingsuiting it. We shot a jump in the valley and i flew back with the disc and footage.
The end result was (as i expected) wholly underwhelming and suffered many of the issues evident here. My ex-boss was convinced that the project hadn't been a runaway success because of the poor knitting together of the component camera shots (mostly down to lens distortion which couldn't be sufficiently corrected using distortion correction software). I, on the other hand, am quite convinced that it wasn't a success because it is intrinsically flawed as an entertainment concept. Viewing such an image on a 2 dimensional screen is wholly confusing. The human brain isn't really equipped to deal with the competing stimuli it is being presented with here. Yes we can understand and process movement towards and its opposite; movement away from, but not at the same time in the same image. Consequently the only way we can make any sense of these images is to focus on a specific area at any one time, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of the exercise.
Even when the image is projected onto a domed roof and the viewer stands in the centre to be truly surrounded by (marketing like to call it immersed in) the picture, we still have to focus on key areas at any one time in order to process what we're seeing. Consequently i believe that whilst the idea of a 360 degree camera is interesting 'in principle' it proves to be 'in practice' an uncomfortable experience which requires the viewer to ignore most of the information being presented to them in order to be made sense of.
As a method of data capture and analysis tool, i'm sure 360 could prove to be very useful but as a visual spectacle, i just can't see its value. just my tuppence worth!
