360 camera for the same price as a GoPro!? - Samsung Gear 360, SDC2016
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
1,160 words · ~5 min read
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so at the behest of Samsung we've been down in San Francisco for the last
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couple of days at their 2016 developers conference to get our fingers on the
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puls of what's hot in the industry right now and the answer pretty much no matter
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where you look is VR there are still a
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lot of challenges to overcome weight of the devices uh dizziness image quality
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both in terms of frame rate and resolution cost the requirement to have
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a phone connected though Samsung did hint they are working on Standalone
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devices but there is a lot of cool stuff
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coming down the pipe that is going to help continue vr's March towards
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mainstream acceptance first up is the gear 360 this is not the first time
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they've shown it the actual unveiling was at Mobile World Congress about a
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month ago but this was our first chance to spend some real quality Hands-On time
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with it the device itself is pretty simple on each side you'll find a 180°
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wide angle f2.0 aperture lens with uh
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combined 30 megapixels of sensor resolution behind them though it appears
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that that resolution is utilized only for Stills and when it comes to video
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you'll be limited to almost 4K or 3840
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by 1920 the unit we checked out isn't
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quite finished so the side door was taped on but that didn't stop us from
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popping it off to have a look at the micro SD slot and swappable 1350
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milliamp battery that's good for two or so hours of recording the camera is dust
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and splash resistant there will be an an ip68 rated case available later and
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we're expecting at the time of filming this it to cost somewhere in the
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neighborhood of $400 given its €350
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price across the pond that's cool Linus but how does it work really well
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actually this is an impressive little piece of Kit you pick your mode Stills
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video time-lapse or short looping video
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is a separate mode from video for some reason then with the camera paired to
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the phone via Wi-Fi Direct you don't have enough bandwidth to save a file
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directly to the phone this way but what you'll get is a really nice live preview
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of what you're shooting once you press record then what you do is you browse
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the files on the camera convert and copy them over to your phone and you can play
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it back a number of different ways you can view the raw unstitched file you can
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look around using the motion sensor on your phone or you can pop it in a gear
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VR and have the full immersive experience considering that it's priced
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similarly to a high-end GoPro I can see a lot lot of creators having a ton of
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fun with a device like this speaking of fun it's time to go hit the VR demos
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first up is gaming this Vulcan demo was really impressive they got this alien
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assault game that's reminiscent of a VR game that I played at an arcade about 12
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years ago so weapon aiming is handled by looking rather than actually pointing
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the weapon the graphics are fairly rudimentary and given it's a tech demo
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it's impressive it's playable at all but the gameplay is pretty easy with a
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blaster that takes out like 10 dudes at once once in a secondary fire with no
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recharge that drops an asteroid on the entire assaulting Force which doesn't
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sound impressive until you consider that this is running on a device that is
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literally a thousandth the size of the gigantic gaming booth that I was
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standing in all those years ago and this is in no small part thanks to Vulcan the
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low-level API that is Now supported on the Galaxy S7 is capable of volumetric
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effects realtime Shadows light refraction anti-aliasing translucency
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and in a nutshell a similar or better graphical experience than what you could
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expect from an Xbox 360 a last gen gaming console I mean sure you won't be
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running this realtime star Mass
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accumulation demo in a VR environment
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yet but seeing the performance improvement from open GES to Vulcan
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gives me more hope for the rate at which this is going to improve in the future
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downstairs we found a couple of more impressive demos what stood out about
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this one was the fact that aside from using ceras to track the location of the
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person they tricked out these Nerf guns
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with lights and actually I think they're
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bluo Wireless triggers so you could play
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another sort of drone assault game firing the gun independently of where
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your head is pointed because it's wireless the latency did make it a
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little bit disorienting but man when
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accessories like this come out for lower latency Solutions like the HTC
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VI VR man very cool which isn't to say that every
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game likee VR experience has to be all about the lowest possible latency I
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think the most impressive demo we saw was from globa cor they had this sort of
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escape room with 83500 optit track cameras feeding into a
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sixc core desktop running a gtx980 and
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then from there the positional data was streamed over Wi-Fi to a Galaxy S7 in a
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gear VR that is actually running the
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game itself the graphical Fidelity of which
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was the best we saw running off of a phone here at the show the position of
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rigid bodies uh their rotations and positions in the scene are being tracked
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by the cameras and to differentiate the objects in the scene white I reflective
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markers are attached in unique patterns so they can be manipulated and
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reconfigured to solve the puzzle their Indiana Jon style puzzle uses a total of
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10 tracked objects including a lantern that provides more or less light to you
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in real time there are some limitations here if you put the objects too close
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together things can get a bit janky and the and the same goes if you obstruct
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the camera's view of the IR reflective markers but overall the immersion was
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the best out of the demos we saw and they even told us they had problems with
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people trying to run out of the room that they were trapped in once the door
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lifted and had to physically restrain people to keep them from barging into a
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physical wall oops so thanks for checking out our VR Roundup here at the
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Samsung developer conference 2016 don't miss any of our Samsung developer
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conference videos by checking out the applicable playlist and if you're not subscribed to lius Tech tips make sure
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you do that as well