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IPFS News Link • Business/ Commerce

With VR180, YouTube Steps Gingerly Toward Virtual Reality

• https://www.wired.com

Done well, virtual reality feels immediate, immersive, and exciting. Even 360-degree video, which merely surrounds you in a scene you can't explore, transports you to a place unlike any other. But doing VR well requires tons of money, time, and skill, only to reach the few people with the gear needed to enjoy it. Despite all the proclamations that This Will Be the Year of VR, the tech just isn't ready.

When it is, though, YouTube wants to be the place you go. To help make that happen, it just announced VR180, an format designed to make creating immersive content a whole lot easier. VR180 cameras from LG, Lenovo, and the Chinese company Yi will follow this winter. The goal is to carve a path between today's 2-D video and the immersive, interactive stuff of tomorrow.

Of course, VR180 does not in any way qualify as virtual reality. Rather, the format renders 180-degree video in stereoscopic 3-D. The picture appears wider than your field of view (about 135 degrees) so you must move your head slightly to take in the whole scene. Stereoscopy provides a remarkable sense of depth and size, but even at its best, it's like sitting in a dome theater watching the night sky above you. If you turn around, all you'll see is black.


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