We’ve just read once, twice, three times this most excellent tutorial / thought piece by D Coetzee, entitled “Capturing Virtual Worlds: A Method for Taking 360 Virtual Photos and Videos“.

The article gets into the dirty details of how we might transform a high-powered, highly interactive VR experience into a compact* file sharable with all our friends on a multitude of platforms (cardboard, mergeVR, oculus, webVR, etc)

Having spent a great deal of time figuring out these strategies ourselves, its good to see someone articulate the challenge, the process, and future development paths so well.

Most accessible present-day solution: a script that renders thin vertical strips with a rotating stereo camera array, then stitches into the final panorama

Enjoy.

• the term “compact” is used here liberally. A typical 5 minute VR experience might weigh in at 500MB for the download. Transforming this into a 120MB movie might be considered lightweight… for VR. Time to beef up your data plans, kiddies. And developers, say it with me now : algorithmic content 🙂