04-13-2020, 06:36 PM
Thanks for both bringing up points we'd have made.
It wouldn't be hard to bring a VR video into our SDK. In fact we've suggested that on another thread.
But the freedom and interactivity of Explorer is a big value to us, and you can't get with videos.
That said we've looked into riding through videos. The first issue is you don't want extremely shaky video that comes from being attached to a bike, but you also don't want the head direction baked into that comes from being from a helmet cam. To do it right you would decouple all rotation from the video and control that separately as a function of the ride and possibly where you are looking (like VirZOOM's anti-sickness solution).
Another problem is smoothness and resolution. 360 videos of sufficient resolution take a ton of bandwidth to stream, and most are a lower resolution than Explorer when you actually watch them in VR. The reason is 360 requires about 8 times the area you can see at once, all of which must be sent to you because you can look around faster than Internet latency. It's not a like a video game which just renders what you can see.
Explorer downloads images at the best resolution that can be streamed at riding speeds over most people's internet connection. It's 4k resolution that doesn't have rectilinear compression or the encoding compression artifacts of most streamable videos, and displays at a smooth 60 or 72 fps with viewpoint interpolation.
Note it's on our backlog to show you the highest 8k resolution like PC/Wander when you come to a stop.
It wouldn't be hard to bring a VR video into our SDK. In fact we've suggested that on another thread.
But the freedom and interactivity of Explorer is a big value to us, and you can't get with videos.
That said we've looked into riding through videos. The first issue is you don't want extremely shaky video that comes from being attached to a bike, but you also don't want the head direction baked into that comes from being from a helmet cam. To do it right you would decouple all rotation from the video and control that separately as a function of the ride and possibly where you are looking (like VirZOOM's anti-sickness solution).
Another problem is smoothness and resolution. 360 videos of sufficient resolution take a ton of bandwidth to stream, and most are a lower resolution than Explorer when you actually watch them in VR. The reason is 360 requires about 8 times the area you can see at once, all of which must be sent to you because you can look around faster than Internet latency. It's not a like a video game which just renders what you can see.
Explorer downloads images at the best resolution that can be streamed at riding speeds over most people's internet connection. It's 4k resolution that doesn't have rectilinear compression or the encoding compression artifacts of most streamable videos, and displays at a smooth 60 or 72 fps with viewpoint interpolation.
Note it's on our backlog to show you the highest 8k resolution like PC/Wander when you come to a stop.