Samsung announces Project Beyond, a 360-degree 3D camera that creates virtual reality worlds
Samsung just announced Project Beyond at its 2014 Developer Conference — it's a 360-degree camera module that captures everything around it in 3D. It captures a gigapixel of 3D footage every second, and can stream that footage back to someone wearing Samsung's Gear VR headset, essentially transporting them into that world. Essentially, Project Beyond continuously creates a virtual 3D environment of wherever it is placed — Samsung said people would be able to tune in live or record footage to be viewed at any time. In a lot of ways it feels like the cameras seen on a Google Street View backpack, but much smaller and more portable. It's otherwise a pretty unique (and surely expensive) piece of hardware.
Naturally, your instinct is to step forward and explore the world, but Project Beyond is a stationary camera. You can see what the camera sees from the place it was set down, and no more.
The quality of the video itself wasn't quite as impressive as I was hoping for, either — it's noisier and grainer than I expected, given the relatively high resolution output of the Gear VR headset.