With a growing number of people exploring virtual reality (VR) through 360-degree video, the market for affordable VR cameras just keep getting bigger. As a result, many consumers are on the look out for a practical but affordable VR/360-degree camera. With its small form factor and newly introduced Android compatibility, Rylo hopes to draw in customers.
The Rylo camera was launched in October 2017, with the aim of offering cinematic quality 360-degree image and video capture to iPhone users in a very tiny package. The company have now launched a version of its app for Android, opening up the market to a larger audience.
The company behind the camera claim that from the moment the user presses record, the two ultra-wide lenses on the Rylo combine to provide a full 360-degree field-of-view. For VR video, full K resolution of the spherical video output is available, or users can convert the video into 2D HD video using the Rylo software, which also automatically corrects for any distortion from the spherical image capture.
One of the major selling points advertised by Rylo is its stabilisation software. Though creating smooth, stable video is the dream of many amateur video creators, the equipment needed to produce a cinema-quality smooth video is expensive, and out of reach for the average consumer. Rylo say its automatic image stabilisation removes unwanted camera motion to provide smooth, high-quality video. Users can even toggle the stabilisation on or off, so they can judge the difference for themselves.
To open the editing app, users simply have to connect the Rylo camera to their phone and the app wil automatically open. From there, users have a range of options, including a ‘Frontback’ picture-in-picture mode, and a feature that lets the user tap a specific point of interest which the app will then track automatically to produce a video that connects each designated point.
The Android Rylo camera is available for $499 (USD) from the Rylo website, and comes with an Everyday Case, battery, 16GB microSD card, protective pouch and charge cables. VRFocuswill continue to bring you the latest news on new VR products and services.
Anyone that’s tried recording virtual reality (VR) video on a budget will already know some of the struggles. DIY GoPro solutions work, but still introduce a host of problems of their own. Getting high-resolution, fully spherical 360 video is a daunting task for content creators, but if you have the money to splash for a high-end VR camera solution, then Insta360’s latest cameras will be music to your ears.
At CES 2018, Las Vegas, Insta360 revealed two new cameras designed for VR video that’ll make the task of VR content creation easier than ever for high end creators with demanding workloads. The first camera is a eight-lens VR camera and has a host of features that are sure to impress.
The camera shoots fully spherical 3D and 360 video at up to 10K resolution. Not shabby at all. The camera boasts noise free images and video even in low light environments. While specific specifications and a release date aren’t available right now, the camera is expected to retail at around $12,000 USD – though even this number isn’t concrete.
The other new camera is a prototype for a light field camera, which can create 180 degree videos with “6 degrees of freedom.” Essentially, this means viewers actually have six separate points from which they can view the scene, giving them a slightly different perspective with each. The prototype currently allows for 1.5 feet of movement in all six directions, giving a fair amount of flexibility.
The effect is achieved thanks to a 128 camera array which captures both the intensity and direction of light at every point within a scene. While it currently only records 180 degree video, Insta360 say the technology can be applied to 360 videos too.
It’s all very fascinating. The new 10K 360 camera is sure to make high-end VR video clearer and crisper than ever, while the Six Degrees of Freedom camera array is promising technology that can make future videos much more immersive than is currently possible.
Info on specific products incorporating Insta360’s light field technology will be shared at a later date.
For all of the latest advancements in VR video, cameras and software, make sure to keep reading VRFocus.
Standalone virtual reality (VR) headsets have a lot of appeal. You don’t need a specific type of, of expensive, smartphone and you don’t need to worry about time in VR eating up your phone’s battery. It’s also portable, so can be easily taken on a train or plane without needing cumbersome cables. Not surprising, then, that Google have gone down the standalone headset route with the reveal of more details on the Mirage Solo.
Google initially revealed plans for a standalone version of its Google Daydream at the Google I/O event in 2017. Since then, Google’s Vice President of Virtual and Augmented Reality Clay Bavor says the company has been fostering partnerships with other companies such as Lenovo and YI to not only create a new headset, but also new, portable and affordable ways to capture the important moments of people’s lives in 360-degrees with new pocket-sized VR cameras.
The Lenovo Mirage Solo will use a newly-developed technology google have named WorldSense. This builds on years of work Google have done into localisation, mapping and tracking to allow for inside-out tracking that Google claim is on a level with PC-based sensor tracking. WorldSense is said to allow for movements such as ducking, dodging, leaning and moving forwards, backwards or side-to-side in a strafing motion, allowing new gameplay elements to be added.
Google say that the Lenovo Mirage Solo will have a wide field-of-view and an improved display for blur-free images to minimise the ‘screen-door effect’. Google are also working with developers to bring new content to the platform, including a title based in the iconic cyberpunk universe of Blade Runner, titled Blade Runner: Revelations. Lenovo Mirage Solo users will also have access to the currently available Google Daydream catalogue of over 250 apps and videogames.
Also being introduced are the VR180 cameras, simple pocket-sized devices designed to be accessible to all users that allows anyone to capture three-dimensional images and videos in ultra HD 4K resolution. Those captured images or videos can then be viewed on Google Cardboard, Google Daydream or the Lenovo Mirage Solo.
The release date for the Lenovo Mirage Solo has not yet been revealed, but the first of the VR180 cameras, such as the YI Horizon VR180 and the Lenovo Mirage Camera, are expected to go on sale sometime in Spring 2018. Further information on Google’s VR projects will be here on VRFocus.
Creators of virtual reality (VR) and 360-degree video will be all-too-familiar with the painstaking process of editing and stitching together footage. Even with modern editing software, this process often take a long time, and usually requires either a PC or powerful smartphone. Pisofttech are introducing a Panoramic VR camera that will avoid all of these restrictions, and will be available for demonstration at CES 2018.
Pisofttech will be officially launching the Pilot Era camera, a VR 360-degree camera which is capable for performing real-time 8K video-stitching without an external device or software. As such, photographers and VR content creators can create high-quality VR videos and stills, stitch them together and upload them to the cloud all using just the camera unit itself, without need for an additional device.
The company has drawn on work it has done in developing 3D and panoramic algorithms for technology companies such as Rockchip, along with cloud platform technology such as the Tencent cloud in order to create the software that allows the Pilot Era camera to act as an all-in-one capture and editing device.
“The new Pilot camera frees photographers and VR content creators from days of painful post processing effort to stitch together the panoramic video. Now they can conveniently and easily shoot extremely high-quality panoramic images and videos to create immersive experiences and share them in real time without any additional equipment,” said Adler Shen, CEO, Pisofttech. “Our core technology is the object recognition algorithm, including motion analysis technology, which enables the panoramic camera to detect and interact with images more accurately and makes it smarter. This technology will be integrated into the Pilot Era soon, so that the camera can recognize images locally rather than having to upload them to the cloud for recognition and analysis. This will provide a huge performance advantage over systems that rely on the CPU or GPU to run vision algorithms.”
Pisofttech will be showcasing the Pilot Era camera at Booth #42974, Tech West, Sands Expo Level 2, Hall A-D during CES 2018. VRFocus will also have a presence at the event and will be bringing you the latest from the show floor.
The popularity of 360-degree video continues to grow, remaining one of the biggest ways that people experience virtual reality (VR) content. As such, many companies are searching for ways to improve the experience for 360-degree video viewers. TwoEyes Tech are taking lessons from human vision with its new binocular 360-degree field-of-view VR camera.
TwoEyes Tech are mirroring human eyes sight by producing a camera by taking the standard distance between human eyes into consideration when capturing images, using two pairs of fisheye lenses arranged 65 millimetres apart in order to produce 360-degree video that is more comfortable to watch.
By using this approach, a single filming session can capture 360-degree 3D footage that can be used on VR headsets, smartphones, PC monitors and 3D TVs. The videos captured are in full high-definition, 3D and red-cyan mode and can be converted into 180-degree and 360-degree content, so a single recording can create up to six different types of content.
The company says that the camera is simple to use. When held horizontally, it will automatically capture images in binocular mode, but when help vertically, it will switch to monocular mode. Recordings captured by the device can be viewed using a paired smartphone or uploaded to social media.
Song HunJoo, CEO of TwoEyes Tech said: “We are planning to revamp our product name for a more global audience once we start mass producing and selling the cameras. The challenge we are facing now is to create a quality product that functions well and is easy to use.”
TwoEyrs Tech is planning further expansion from VR cameras into video-related software, with initial plans for a VR video editing program to be added to its product line.
Visitors to CES 2018 will be able to view demonstrations of its products at Booth #51677, Eureka Park, Hall G. VRFocus will be present at the event as well, bringing you the latest news and hands-on report from the show floor.
Sport organisers and teams are continually looking at new ways to engage their audiences and attract new fans. Growing in popularity is the use of virtual reality (VR) and 360-degree video as a means of getting viewers closer to the action, making for a far more entertaining experience. And it seems as though Formula 1 (F1) is taking this embrace of 360 technology very seriously, as it’s been reported all 2018 F1 cars will have a 360-degree camera on board.
In a tweet by Tobi Grüner – the F1 reporter for German website AMuS – he says that 360-cameras will become mandatory on cars, mounted on the front chassis. While he doesn’t mention which cameras these might be, from the image given below it certainly looks like a 360fly device, and being F1 it’s more than likely the 4K version.
Next years F1 cars will feature 360° cameras. They will be mounted on the chassis – right in front of the Halo. Mandatory on all cars. #AMuSpic.twitter.com/B96ytWqU3I
With the current news in F1 dominated by the new Halo device which is going to be fitted to cars next year in a bid to improve driver safety, having an additional ball like device right in front of their heads may not please most drivers. Whether the above design is just a prototype is unclear. As the 360fly features just one lens the device might be slightly sunken into the chassis for a more streamlined design – and less likely to fling off and hit something. This will still give a 360 view, you just wouldn’t be able to look down as much.
For fans on the other hand, this inclusion would mean a whole new way to enjoy F1 depending on how it’s implemented. The first thought would be livestreaming – imagine watching the entire race from the front of Lewis Hamilton’s car – although that maybe a few years off due to the challenge of broadcasting 360 footage from 20 cars at the same time.
The cameras could be used by commentators and broadcasters, switching to a 360 shot as and when they chose to. The most likely scenario to begin with will be after race footage, with F1 either releasing YouTube videos or content via a specific app.
Whatever happens, as soon as VRFocus finds out more we’ll let you know.
Consumer 360-degree cameras come in all shapes and sizes, from standalone units like Samsung Gear 360 to devices that attach to smartphones like the Insta360 Air or Nano. Currently running an IndieGoGo crowd-funding campaign are NoMatterWhat Technologies for its Fusion Lens camera designed for iPhone.
Featuring a duel lens system where one lens sits on the front iPhone camera and the other sits on the back, the Fusion Lens allows users to shoot 360-degree video at 6K resolution. Because the system uses the native front and rear cameras of an iPhone, Fusion Lens introduces an ultra-wide range of light to hit the cameras CMOS sensor, bringing over 180-degree field-of-view (FoV) for each camera.
With the accompanying Fusion Lens app, users can stitch images from both cameras in real-time, allowing for instant 360 images that are ideal for sharing across social media channels. Since both cameras have different resolutions, exposure and focus, the app will adjust the images accordingly for the best image result.
As the Fusion Lens is a clip on device it doesn’t need to be charged, nor does it require technologies like wifi or Bluetooth, meaning that it becomes a much more cost effective solution than some of its counter parts.
The IndieGoGo campaign only launched a couple of days ago and has already exceeded its funding goal of $10,000 USD from 139 backers. Pledge tiers begin at $39 for the limited Super Early Bird offer, saving 43 percent off the standard price of $69. After that offer sells out further funding tiers are priced at $44 and then $49. There’s also a retail pack of 20 available for $840, offering a bulk saving of 39 percent.
Currently Fusion Lens supports iPhone 7, 7 Plus, 8 and 8 Plus with the launch expected in February 2018. NoMatterWhat Technologies also plans on making an iPhone X and Android compatible models in the near future.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of Fusion Lens, reporting back with any further updates on the campaign.
As virtual reality (VR) and 360-degree video becomes more popular and more accessible, the technology that powers those experiences is also changing, to offer clearer, higher-quality picture. This in turn fuels demand for high-quality cameras to record better experiences. To answer this demand, Detu have launched a professional grade 8K VR camera.
The Detu F4 Plus camera is a panoramic VR camera capable of capturing images at up to 8K resolution, whether this is a 360-degree video recording, panoramic still image or livestream. The device features four 200 degree fisheye lenses, which have eight layers to minimise any distortion or glare effects. The camera is capable of capturing images with a resolution of 7680×3840 per lens at 30fps.
Footage captured with the Detu F4 Plus camera is then stitched automatically using the DetuStitch software. The device is also set up for simple livestreaming, either using wi-fi or an ethernet cable wen the device is connected to a PC. The Detu F4 Plus can livestream to several 360-degree livestreaming platforms, including YouTube and Facebook.
A 4800mAh lithium-ion battery provides power, and is capable of shooting for up to 120 minutes on a full charge. The battery is removable, and a Detu charging station can charge two batteries at once, a useful feature for content creators who require long shooting times.
The Detu F4 Plus is largely aimed at professional photographers and VR content creators. Detu plan for the device to be available shortly through Amazon, priced at $2599 (USD). Further information can be found on the Detu website.
VRFocus will continue to report on new VR hardware and software.
I have spent a lot of time with 360-degree cameras over the course of the last year, but things have really heated up in the last six months. The market is starting to evolve and meet consumer and professional demands. More importantly, the breadth of these cameras is finally starting to allow artists to offer unique and creative 360-degree content that simple wasn’t possible years ago. This is important because the VR market is still in its early stages and any quality content that consumers can view and enjoy in VR will help the overall market grow. The 360-degree camera market has evolved into a user-friendly fully-integrated market where creative minds can just buy an off-the-shelf camera and start creating high-quality immersive 360 video and photo content. The Insta360 Pro is the culmination of years of trial and error by multiple companies in the market, and is evidence of many of the lessons learned by Insta360 as they released their own consumer 360 cameras.
State of the 360 Camera Market
The first 360 cameras were just a series of GoPros slapped together, and were very roughly stitched together to create 360 photos and videos. Eventually, some consumer 360 cameras started to enter the market like the Ricoh Theta, Samsung Gear 360 and Insta360 Nano and 360 cameras got more integrated and simpler to use. However, at the high-end for professionals your only choices were cameras like the Nokia OZO which has dropped to $25,000, or to build your own rig with a bunch of identical 4K cameras. At the ultimate high-end of this are companies like HypeVR who are taking RED 8K Weapon cameras by the dozen and seamlessly stitching them together with secret sauce to do volumetric 360 videos. The creativity in the 360 market continues to expand as the options get more user-friendly and the cameras become more integrated into a single unit.
One key aspect of 360 cameras is that at lower resolutions, the content is generally degraded to a point where it no longer looks good. In the early days, most 360-degree content looked pretty rough unless it was recorded in 8K. Eventually, this came down to 4K, but for the best quality content today, you need 8K to really ensure that visual fidelity isn’t poor inside of a 1440p headset like an HTC Vive, Oculus Rift or Samsung Gear VR. This is because when you think about 360-degree content, an 8K 360 video is really the same as a 4K 180 video which means that when you’re viewing it through a roughly 100-ish degree field of view, you’re only looking at 2K resolution at any given moment which is about the same resolution of the display. Any lower source content and your VR headset is looking at pixels that are a lower resolution than the display 1 inch from your face. Therefore, 8K resolution video is crucial to have when you are looking to provide a high-quality VR video experience.
The Insta360 Pro
The culmination of all these improvements has resulted in one very highly integrated device that is both professional class in its capabilities and consumer friendly in its simplicity. The Insta360 Pro is Insta360’s first professional grade 360 camera with their first two 360 cameras being smartphone-tethered consumer products for iPhone and Android. The Insta360 Pro is a completely standalone untethered camera capable of significantly more than either the Insta360 Nano or Insta360 Air and pretty much every other camera at the $3500 price. At this price, Insta360 really shook up the market for high-end products and I believe is the major reason why Nokia had to drop the price of their OZO camera Additionally, they’ve made Facebook’s own 360-degree camera efforts seem a bit unrealistic and overpriced. Since the launch of their own 360-degree cameras, Facebook has gone from wanting to license the design to manufacturers to completely open sourcing the designs.
The Insta360 Pro’s capabilities have really enabled the market to also deliver high quality 360 streams that can be shown to the world with support for 4K Facebook Live streams. This capability is huge because Facebook 4K 360 live streams are pretty much the only live 360-degree footage on Facebook that doesn’t look like crap because of Facebook’s heavy compression algorithms. One of the great things about the Insta360 Pro is that you can let the camera do all the stitching itself in-camera so all you get is the final 360-degree photo or video, or you can stitch it using software in post. Doing things in post will always result in a higher resolution product, because the processing capabilities of the camera are limited.
One of the really important features of the Insta360 Pro that the 360-degree camera market absolutely has needed is the in-camera stabilization. In-camera stabilization is crucial because the shakiness of many moving 360 videos shot by users is enough to make even the most veteran VR users sick. The Insta360 Nano introduced this feature using the gyroscope in the iPhone as a reference, but with the Insta360 Pro there is an in-camera gyroscope. The gyroscope when paired with the camera’s footage can produce stabilized 360 video footage that lacks the shakiness that many 360 video cameras have when recording a 360 video on the move. Some people have solved this shakiness problem in 360-degree video with gimbals and other mechanical stabilizers, and they will always have their place for the smoothest possible footage, but having an in-camera gyroscope ensures that the smallest little bump doesn’t ruin footage.
There is also a detachable mount at the bottom of the camera if you want to attach it to anything using a standard ¾ tripod mount. The reality is that you can remove this if it is too big for your application or you want to use something else. This mount creates enough distance between the camera and whatever you mount it to so that you aren’t blocking too much of the camera’s view by getting too close to the camera.
Real World Testing
Insta360 loaned me an Insta360 Pro for two weeks to test which I took with me to the Santa Monica Pier, San Diego Comic-Con and the local beach. As you can imagine, there was no shortage of interesting photos and video footage to take in these scenarios. Taking the camera with me in these scenarios made me learn a lot about the camera’s ups and downs and what kind of content I could expect to get out of it as well. I shot a mix of live-stitched 4K 360 and post-stitched 8K 360 video as well as 3D 6K 360 video footage and plenty of 8K 360 photos. At the time that I had the camera, the 4K 360 live feature wasn’t supported yet by Facebook so I didn’t test that out but its available now and I’ve seen it successfully used.
Before you start using the camera, you need to ensure that you have the right memory card, because if you don’t use the right memory card the camera will run a test on your card to see if its capable of handling 8K 360 video. If your memory card doesn’t pass this internal speed test, then the camera won’t shoot 8K 360 video, only photos. Therefore, it’s extremely important to consult Insta360’s website and community to ensure your memory card is compatible. When you start up the camera itself, you just need to press the power button and wait about a minute or two for the camera to boot up. Once it is booted up, then you can start up the application and try to record an 8K 360 video at which point it will test your memory card. After that, it is advised by Insta360 to calibrate the camera for the scene you plan to shoot in so that the camera’s stitching algorithm matches the scene around it. This process takes less than 60 seconds, but is advisable to do every time you switch places to get the optimal stitching results. One thing to keep in mind is that it’s advisable to stand more than 5 feet away from the camera when you are doing this, that way you don’t throw off the camera’s stitching algorithms.
In my testing, I found that the 360 photos almost always come out very clear and sharp and are snapped extremely quickly. If you use the live stitching feature, you must wait longer between photo takes until the camera has finished stitching all the images together and Insta360 says they are working to reduce this wait time. It takes about 10 seconds until you can take another photo if you let the camera do the stitching rather than doing it later on a computer. In my personal experience, unless you absolutely need to be sure you’ve gotten the shot live stitching isn’t worth the time you have to take waiting between shots. When it comes to video, the capture time can lag sometimes where it only starts to capture a second or two later and the same happens when you press stop remotely. The one thing I have noticed is that the video stitching works best when you have your subjects a few feet away, if people walk too closely across the cameras the stitch lines are very obvious, but if they’re about 5 feet away or more the stitch lines are almost impossible to see.
The Insta360 Pro is controlled primarily with an iPhone, iPad or Android app wirelessly but can also be connected to over a network using a wired connection as well. The application allows you to switch between photo and video modes in the camera and toggle between live stitching or just regular shooting with separate images or videos. Additionally, you can adjust the bracketing and enable features like HDR and time lapse videos. From my experience, the application worked exceptionally well in almost every scenario except for at Comic-Con where the interference was so bad that I was barely able to make a connection with the camera for more than a minute. If you plan on using it in a signal noisy scenario with a lot of people like Comic-Con, be prepared to go wired.
In terms of low-light performance, I wasn’t particularly impressed with the Insta360 Pro’s low light image quality or noise but that’s been my experience with most 360 cameras up until that point. That might change with an update or shooting multiple exposures with the HDR feature, but you can’t shoot any moving objects in 360 with very low light like night time. I wouldn’t suggest any 360 camera for low light right now partially because we’re dealing with multiple smaller sensors rather than the larger sensors you see in the top-end DSLRs and Mirrorless cameras. In low light, the camera is also very sensitive to bright sources of light and those can throw off the stitching and the overall cohesion of the 360 images.
In terms of final product, I believe that Insta360’s Pro produced some really high quality 360 photos and videos that simply have been unparalleled by any other camera I’ve used. People were continually blown away by the quality of the images and video and the 8K resolution images are so high res on Facebook that you can zoom in on the 360 images and still get a sharp image. Battery life is about an hour per battery, but they batteries are hot swappable and external power is also an option. One 64GB SD card is good for about 30 minutes of 8K 360 video footage. So, if you want to shoot continuously for an hour, you’ll probably need a 128GB SD card. For even longer periods of recording, you can use USB-attached SSD storage like the SanDisk Extreme 500 which comes in capacities of 120GB to 500GB.
When I was loaned the Insta360 Pro, I was given a brand-new camera which comes in its own hard case with foam inserts for the camera and accessories. I provided my own tripod for the camera, and I would recommend anyone that buys a 360 camera have some sort of tripod to ensure the best possible footage. Hand held is possible, but it will never look as sharp as things taken with a tripod. Inside of the box you get the camera, power adapter, Type-C data cable, USB Ethernet adapter, internal battery for the camera, a cleaning cloth, rubber protective lens cover and a network cable. Mine also came with a carrying sling if you want to hand carry the camera without a tripod attached to the bottom of it.
Things Insta360 Could Improve
While I enjoyed using the Insta360 Pro, I believe that there is still some room for improvement. One of the things that seemed to continually bother me was the boot up time. If I knew that I was going to be moving somewhere far with the camera, I would turn it off to save power. Booting it back up was a bit of a long process and should be much quicker than it is. Insta360 says they are working on an update that will bring the boot time down to under 20 seconds to address this. After booting up the camera, in direct sunlight, it was also very difficult to see if the camera was on by looking at the in-camera LCD. It would be great if you could see the LCD display better in broad daylight even though most of the things on the camera can be seen in the smartphone/tablet app.
The black color of the camera tends to attract heat and make the internal fan more necessary and harder to run in fanless mode. The company offers a silver version but it is less commonly in stock. I also would like to see Insta360 upgrade the Wi-Fi in the Insta360 Pro because I believe that at places like the beach I should be getting more than 30-40 feet of range where there is virtually no interference at all. I don’t usually want to be in my Insta360 Pro shots, so being as far back as possible is my preferred distance, Insta360 says they’re aware of the issue and are working on improving it. I also believe that the Insta360 Stitcher app for Windows still needs work in terms of stability, it has crashed multiple times with multiple versions and that’s just not a ‘Pro’ level program quite yet. But they are constantly updating the application and improving it. Finally, I would really like to see Insta360 build an evolving database of SD cards that work with their cameras and make it as visible as possible. I’ve seen countless people buy the wrong SD cards for the Insta360 Pro not realizing that it was very picky about the memory cards it supports. Overall, it seems that many of the issues with the Insta360 Pro that I had are either already being worked on or should be ironed out in the next few updates. That constant iteration and improvement has been a hallmark of Insta360’s development process.
Conclusion
My experience with the Insta360 Pro really shows how far the industry has come in terms of 360-degree cameras and how close we are to high-quality cameras for everyone. I believe that the Insta360 Pro is the best prosumer 360 camera on the market right now that satisfies many of the more high-end features that people want to see on a 360-degree camera. It also has some of the easiest workflows to setup and run quickly which may be attractive to professional users that want a high quality 360 8K video without needing to setup multiple cameras and calibrate them. While it still has some kinks to work out, I have seen how quickly and diligently the Insta360 has worked to solve issues and update capabilities. I have no doubt that people who already own an Insta360 Pro are happy with their cameras and are happier with it now than they were maybe a month or two ago.
While the $3,500 price tag isn’t particularly accessible to many consumers yet, it is properly priced to reach the prosumer market. I believe at $1,500 or $2,000 we could see this camera take an even stronger hold in the market with more amateur videographers adopting it rather than consumer cameras. I’m already seeing people attaching the Insta360 Pro to professional drones and taking 360-degree drone footage of cities and buildings as well as landscapes. People are also using them in scenarios like weddings to offer a new and more immersive experience for the bride and groom to remember their special day. I was also pleasantly surprised to see how many different organizations including Time, CNN and NASA used the Insta360 Pro to do live 360-degree streams of the eclipse that just recently happened in North America.
I hope that others will follow in Insta360’s footsteps and offer high quality 360 cameras that capture in 8K or better. I am still convinced that the Insta360 Pro’s 8K video quality is the standard for what VR content should look like. And while there is plenty of great looking 4K footage out there, compression will wreak havoc on the final product in many cases and 8K is a better starting point in my opinion.
Disclosure: My firm, Moor Insights & Strategy, like all research and analyst firms, provides or has provided research, analysis, advising, and/or consulting to many high-tech companies in the industry, including ARM, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Peraso, Qualcomm and Samsung Electronics cited or related to this article. I do not hold any equity positions with any companies cited in this column. Find more from Moor Insights & Strategy on their web site, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ and YouTube.
Chinese tech giant Huawei have recently filed a trademark application in both the United States and Europe for a 360-degree imaging device called the EnVizion Panoramic VR Camera. This information seems to indicate that Huawei have plans to join the virtual reality (VR)/360-degree imaging market.
Information was recently released by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as well as the EU Intellectual Property Office which revealed the name, but few other details regarding the device, though insiders and analysts have already begun speculating based on details that are available, suggesting that the device is likely to be similar to the Samsung Gear 360 series of cameras.
The application mentioned mobile software and related technologies. Since Huawei is primarily known, especially in the West, for producing mobile devices, it seems likely that the company are also planning on releasing a mobile app to connect to the EnVizion 360. Some analysts have predicted that, similar to the Samsung Gear 360, the EnVizion 360 will also have a small form factor and be capable of connecting directly to an Android smartphone.
Huawei have a hardware event coming up on 16th October, but the new device is unlikely to be announced there, since Trademark applications are a slow process, and Huawei has usually been cautious about announcing a product name before it has been officially trademarked. Most experts are predicting that the device will be officially announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2018, or at Mobile World Congress later that same year.
VRFocus will bring you further news on Huawei’s VR/360-degree projects as it becomes available.
(@tgruener) 
