USC Students work toward the future of VR
“I’ve been into virtual reality for about six months now. I got to work on it in my internship,” Feingold said. “I was able to buy a camera at SXSW, one of the first 360-degree consumer cameras. It’s just two cameras and it stitches [the video] automatically.”
For one of their first projects, Feingold used the $350 camera to film a VR production for the USC Men’s Rowing team, which picked up hits from around the world.
“I made a rowing film — I’m on the rowing team at USC. I sent it to a few people but it got really viral within the rowing community,” Feingold said. “We got messages from the Kuwaiti national rowing team, people in Great Britain, teams in Australia. Lots of people were sharing it.”
“I started getting a lot of requests from people to make them videos, real estate firms, marketing companies, convert and record labels,” Feingold said. “People in L.A. might want to see a house in New York and they don’t even have to be there.”
Jensen spoke on the barriers that VR technology faces. He mentioned the limits of stereo sound when using an interactive headset or VR phone app.
“It’s weird because you’d be looking at something [different], but the audio wouldn’t change, and video games have picked up on that,” Jensen said. “They’ve started mapping sound based off the viewer’s head movements. Consumer public video hasn’t really caught up yet.”
“It’s such a low barrier of entry, the fact that I could just buy one of the [cameras] but also there’s not a lot of people doing it yet,” Feingold said. “It took a lot of teaching myself to stitch and edit.”
See the full story here: http://dailytrojan.com/2016/04/25/students-work-toward-future-virtual-reality-films/