GoPro is preparing to embrace virtual reality with its next round of products. The adventure camera company is currently building a spherical mount that is able to mount multiple GoPro cameras to capture video for VR headsets. It is also working on releasing its own drone for aerial photography.
The Six-Camera Spherical Array holds six GoPro Hero 4 cameras in positions to capture a full 360-degree view. It looks like something similar to the camera arrays used by Google to capture Street View images, and works in pretty much the same way. However, the array doesn’t stitch the video together, and users will still have to be put together using software from Kolor – a VR company that was recently acquired by GoPro.
Once that’s done, the video can be viewed using any VR headset or Youtube 360. Naturally, there is an app involved for loading it onto smartphones that provide 3D viewing.
GoPro CEO Nick Woodman admits that the spherical camera array will not see mass adoption at first, seeing that the user needs to own multiple GoPro cameras and knowledge of video editing to get it to work. However, he sees the product as a proof of concept product to show people what they can do with a spherical camera rig.
A GoPro drone is also in the works, although there are few details about it. All that was said is that it will be ready for sale in the first half of 2016 and will be aimed at consumers.
[Source: Re/code]
