Well… it is my birthday but even though everyone at Linden Lab thinks I’m really cool and great (I supply them with virtual schnapps after all), this wonderful addition to the SL viewer being released today may have been a coincidence.
The ability to make 360 snapshots from within your viewer is now available for testing at the Project Viewer.
They are still working on it but they’ve added a few examples that already look pretty nice.
I think that this will eventually go beyond just a fun way to make pictures and I hope to see these 360 snapshots appear on marketplace, in the destination guide, etc.
Because they are a great way to sell something or show people what a sim has to offer.
You can read the full official announcement by clicking here.
Recently 360 degrees screenshots and video shot within Second Life have been the talk of the day.
Last August the first 360 degrees video was shot inworld (in 1920s Berlin) by Electric Shepherd and and Draxtor Despres, using a camera rig build by Arduenn Schwartzman (read blog about it here).
And Illiastra Ascendent (nvzn Resident) (aka James Reichert) then worked on the 360 degrees photo making technology (see this blogpost).
Well it turns out that Linden Lab was impressed and realised the great potential for this technology because they are now adapting it into a SL viewer, including the stitching together of the images bit!
I think this is great, being able to share wonderful 360 pictures of your top location with other friends in SL but also with people who are not even familiar with our virtual world is a great tool.
I hope LL will also start using these pictures themselves, for instance in the Destination Guide but perhaps also in Marketplace.
It would be great to give people a 360 tour of the house you’re selling!
If you want to read more details and listen to Oz Linden’s talk about the subject, check out Inara Pey’s blog on the subject by clicking here.
After seeing the 360 degrees video shot in Second Life, Jim Reichert decided to see what he could do with this footage and his Hololens.
You may remember his name from a previous article I wrote about his attempt to bring an avatar into the real world.
The result is quite impressive, of course this is only a first test and as Jim explains he had to lower the resolution and the frame-rate is also not that great, but once you realise what you’re watching it becomes clear how impressive this is and that yet another milestone has been reached.
360 degrees video footage has been recorded in a virtual world and is now being projected onto a Hololens, live, while it is being worn in an office.
Combining virtual reality with 360 degrees video with Augmented Reality.
But you’ll see that the possibilities are huge, I look forward to more experiments that bring RL into SL and SL into RL!
As the song goes; “You ain’t seen nothing yet”.
Imagine being able to bring your 360 degrees camera into Virtual Reality, just set it up in the club, house, park or city that you’ve build yourself in Second Life, record it and then share it online with people from all over the world.
Let them get a taste of where you live in VR, let them look around and even give them the feeling they’re actually there by looking at it with their VR headset.
This is now possible!
Yesterday Electric Shepherd from Vimagine (who also worked on the ‘Virtualize it’ documentary for ‘Der Spiegel’) and Draxtor Despres came to 1920s Berlin to test out an amazing 360 degrees camera to film the, as far as I know, first 360 degrees video shot Live in Second Life in real time.
The camera rig was made by Arduenn Schwartzman (of Warbug fame), it has audio and video syncing capabilities and all recorded tracks are then aligned in post production.Even though this is still just an early test, it is already very impressive.
I can imagine short clips like these made in sims all over Second Life being used to show outsiders what life in our virtual world is like and the things that they can experience there.
Because these can also record busy events with lots of people and with many things happening at the same time!
Not only are these just fun videos on youtube, but they are very impressive when viewed through the Gear VR, the Cardboard VR or other headsets.
And not just that, it will also allow me to show off my sim in a whole new way to people who may not have tried Second Life, don’t know how SL works or who don’t have a computer that can handle SL.
And imagine making a full length machinima with this technology!
We could be making 360 films while people in RL have only just experimenting with it.
Once more the people in SL are groundbreaking.
You can see this pioneering footage here;
(not all browsers support 360 degrees video)
Some technical details send in by Draxtor;
We are simulating a goPro Rig of 6 cameras, filming each with 1080 by 1080 (which is already too low = SL can handle more but we need the screens for FRAPS to capture it that high, working on it!!)
I filmed this test myself so there is no syncing which means the Zeppelin dissapears into the cloud at one point: to do live action in SL we need to film at same time.
Syncing is no prob: we have an automated system made by Arduenn Schwartzmann which syncs the six cameras with sound and a visual cue. But again = we need to figure out higher resolution = who has the computers to make it happen, are the colors in sync as well, is the SL lag an issue when aligning the cameras later on (f.e. a dance or fast car race or airship battle etc).
I am working with spatial audio on a RL project so next step will also involve inserting some sounds and dialogue which is spatialized.
All in all the workflow we have is SUPER FAST = plop down the virtual camera rig in SL and shoot, export, stitch, correct = DONE = faster than RL 360 !!!!!!
Big benefits of SL for this = inserting virtual sequences into a RL 360 video = much faster and easier than constructing it via other CGI options because you can film it in REAL TIME and the assets are all there. Yes maybe render engine less able than Unity or Unreal but a LOT easier and ultimately not worse than RL 360 at this point in the game!
And this article wouldn’t be complete without this earlier 360 degrees video in VR experiment by Zuza Ritt;
Even though this is still just an early test, it is already very impressive.
Jo Yardley's Second Life 