- Now for many folks, Ron, they want the easiest solution
when it comes to 360 degree photography
and that's okay, right?
For certain situations, maybe it's for a live event,
you're doing it for sort of the wow factor,
or you have no budget.
There are cameras for that.
- There are a lot of really great reasons for one-shot.
Some of them are just for fun.
I have a ton of fun with my one-shot camera.
It makes people aware of 360 degree photography
and they say how cool it is.
Other people are using it for production
and small businesses and tours.
- And we're even seeing 360 degree video cameras,
which we'll talk about in a moment,
but we've pulled together a collection of three different
360 degree one-shot cameras, but there are certainly
more on the market.
To start things out, I actually went into my archives.
This is an old, old unit.
And I still hold on to it for sort of nostalgia.
It's the 360 One VR.
And it's actually shooting up in this sort of a curve
parabolic mirror.
So, how does this technology work?
- Well this brings me back to the days I started
in 360 photography.
I was happy that avoided using them because, the reason
for that is that the downside is you're shooting
into a mirror so you really just get the quality
of the mirror as your result.
And here we're using, also a retro camera.
- Yeah.
- But they do work with any new DSLR camera
so you can get good amount of resolution,
but again the mirror is the sticky point
where it takes away.
The other thing is, pros and cons, may or may not matter,
it's not a full 180 degree capture, so you don't see
the entire floor and ceiling.
But you do see the whole 360 in one shot.
- And it's great.
Sometimes these are used for people that are really quickly
trying to lay down a virtual tour.
Real estate applications, we're seeing these types
of curved cameras used for people that are on super tight
timelines and don't have the production value.
And we're seeing this technology actually making it back
into the video world of shooting 4K video into this type
of lands and then unwrapping it into HD video
to give sort of a full perspective.
So, not a perfect solution but I think we're gonna see
this type of mirror technology survive.
In fact we have I down here, we'll talk about that
in a second.
In the middle here, you have a camera
that's sort of your 360 toy.
- I would call it mostly a toy.
It's one of the funner toys I've bought in the world
of photography, and it's just a very small camera.
It's really just the white part on top, we have it
on a small tripod selfie stick here.
But it just has two lenses and it shoots
instantaneously both lenses.
- So it's essentially fisheye on this side.
- Right.
- Giving us a 180 degrees this way and a fisheye
in the other side, giving us 180 degrees.
- Right and it's instantaneous.
It also stitches it instantly on the phone.
So I'm able to remotely control it just with the iPhone app,
which has the downsides too because it's...
- Using battery.
- Well see that's true too, but it's connected via WiFi,
so I feel like I spend a lot of time connecting
instead of shooting, so that's kind of a downside to me.
However, it's so fast.
I took one while we were talking about it.
- Yeah and it worked.
- And it's already stitched together
right there on my iPhone.
So the, one of the benefits of that is if I'm out working
or selling, talking to people about what I do
and asking them to hire me to do a virtual tour
of their business, I can show what a 360 image
looks like instantly.
They are usually quite impressed, although again,
the quality of it is toy quality.
- Yeah.
- It's really cool but small sensors,
so the image resolution isn't so high.
- It's kind of the difference between shooting
professional 4K video and shooting 4K video on a GoPro.
The small sensor size leads to a noisier image, it doesn't
have the low light sensitivity and you just don't have
the sort of controls you do of a traditional
stitched approach but, if you need results immediately,
it's fast.
- And to be fair this is a the first version of the camera,
it's a couple years old and there is one coming out where
they're promising larger sensors.
It's not available at the time we're shooting
but I'm gonna get one right away, because the larger sensors
solves so many of the problems, such as noise and resolution
and those are some of the drawbacks to it, the other...
- Who is the maker of this?
This is Theta?
- Ricoh, Ricoh Theta is the name of the camera and you can
look out on Amazon.
There's a professional use for this camera
and I call it my polaroid.
- Okay.
- For anybody there watching that doesn't know the old days
of film, they would use a polaroid to set up
and check their, the composition of an image.
For example, in a studio, I used this as my polaroid
because I can take a quick shot for example like in extended
over places and inside places and decide if it's worth it
to me to make a really high quality panorama by bringing out
the gear that I like most and taking time to set it up.
- So sort of a previsualization, maybe you're doing
a location scout and you just wanna see what challenges,
so the smaller sensor will point out some of the problems
that you could have.
And we have another camera here, which is the V.360 camera.
This is sort of an action camera and it's using the same
sort of curve mirror.
It's got a built-in bubble level on the top
and it can connect two ways.
It has it's own dedicated remote, so you can use that
to trigger, so you don't have to use the phone.
So some of the things you express as a concern has it's own
physical trigger, which you can use, or you can pair it
with a smartphone or a tablet and it gives you the ability
to shoot both 360 degree photos
and it actually does 4K video.
It technically wraps the 4K video so it's 1080 tall,
like regular HD, but then gives you four screens wide
and wraps that into a cylinder.
And for folks who are looking to do 360 degree video
with very little production, which is a very tricky thing,
this camera is a good solution but it's really somewhere
in the same vein of this.
First generation, bit of a novelty, but it does work.
We've actually covered this before and the Video Gear Weekly
series that you could check out here online.
And we've shown you that it does get decent results
under decent lighting, which I think is sort of the same
with all of these.
You're good for the web, but not to make big prints
and not to do a lot of zooming or magnification.
- And I think you mentioned the version one
or the generation one and then in all the,
in the case of these two, generation two is either out
or fast approaching.
The next generation of Ricoh Theta, there's some other
competition very similar.
Also in the 3D video space, there's quite a few projects
coming out.
- For 360's.
- One of them that I've backed that is 360 video, Sphero Cam
for example, is the name that comes to mind right now.
And they're coming out with multi-camera,
similar to the Theta, there's going to be more than two,
I believe six camera, lenses and sensors.
- Yeah.
- They're taking video at the same time and stitching them
on the fly, so you can have real time 360 video and that's
gonna be, I think that's gonna be a big thing.
- Yeah.
- Whether it'll last or not, we'll see.
But having, being able to have a 360 video at a say a live,
say a concert or a live show or something like that
where you can watch online anytime,
I think that's gonna be interesting.
- And we're already seeing YouTube support this
so that you can actually have 360 degree video
that you could turn and actually while playing back
the video in real time, pan a look around.
I actually just saw some teasers for Broadway shows
that let you look around the stage while the dress rehearsal
was happening, which is pretty cool.
So all in all, I think the takeaway here is that 360 degree
one-shot cameras have been around for a long time.
They're seeing a bit of a resurgence, but the quality
there are some trade offs, so we're gonna put this type
of technology aside, but we'll show you some comparisons
a little bit later of what can be made with these
and just file it away as useful tech
that you should keep and eye on.