Over the past few years we’ve seen 3-D panoramic photographs become popular on the Web. These are photos taken with special 360-degree cameras and stitched together to mimic the experience of moving through space. If you’ve ever used the Google Street View feature in Google Maps, you know what a 3-D still photo looks like. But what if Google Street View used video instead of still photos? You’d end up with YellowBird.
YellowBird is a startup in the Netherlands which has developed its own interactive 3-D video technology, including a 360-degree video camera, software to take the data captured by the camera and stitch it together, and a video player that allows anyone to navigate the video by dragging their mouse around. I’ve embedded an example video below. The controls can sometimes be a little overly sensitive, but you’ll get the idea. It is a much better experience than navigating through still photos. It really gives you a sense of walking through a crowd and swiveling your head around.
The startup wants to custom develop 3-D immersive videos for marketing campaigns, and that is probably a good way to make money right now. But eventually it might be better off creating a platform so that anyone can make similar videos with standard off-the shelf cameras and software.
Nice post!
That was pretty damn cool.
That’s a great user experience.
That is beyond cool.
Typical Dutch: raving.
Great idea. panoramic cameras ftw!
Cool concept
RAD
This is pretty bad ass!
In. Sane. Locating Shrooms as we speak…
i looks pretty cool, but i can’t see much use for this. google streetview, or even better, the work that earthmine is doing, have so much potential because the panos are tied to maps. this means you can layer or overlay multiple sets of information, such as asset management data, location specific ads, etc. I don’t see much utility to this beyond a kind of cool gimmick.
I like this a lot. Make sure to interact with the video sample…you aren’t used to clicking a video while it plays but that is the point here.
Wow… Actually kinda surprised porn companies didn’t think of this innovation first, since most video innovation seems to happen in porn first…
I’d love to watch concerts like this, though, I’d totally pay extra for it.
You’d only be half right. Did you notice the pole-dancer, and the sign he walked under that said “Ex Porn Star”?
-Mike
Atom films had a demo done with real player back in 2000 of something similar:
http://bit.ly/18DnHZ
Always wondered why it never went anywhere.
they will be acquired by the end of the year
By Google.
Immersive 3 D video. It would be cool if YellowBird could stitch lat long coordinates into their video on the fly to make videos searchable by location.
I think Immersive Media has been doing this for some time now and is the same tech behind Google maps:
http://mikal.or...sive-video.html
Google Maps took over their own streetview collection with a different camera system than Immersive Media provided. Immersive Media only did a few cities and their Google contract was canceled 3 months from the original launch and all of their imagery was replaced by new higher resolution imagery that Google did themselves.
Doesn’t anyone fact check anymore?
Awesome technology. Very cool.
What would be great is if they tracked all users as they moved around and tracked what they watched to find the interesting parts of the video. Then they could take that data and average it out to get kind of a flythrough of the interesting parts of the video.
good lawd….this is great
Another great way to look at the world. Aligning the technology with business needs sound like a good idea to fetch some income. Having a potential monetization plan from the get go is a great way to start.
That was amazingly fresh to see.
i had fun playing with it
Site is down
First, this is not new. The camera platform for the original few StreetView cities was from Immersive Media where Google pulled frames from 30fps video. Google didn’t want the video and the image quality was not very good. Google then went on to use video capture, but only use select frames.
Immersive Media seems to have faded. They had an advertising division that worked on large accounts, but it seems dormant now and none of the people I dealt with last year remain at the company.
The camera in the picture you show looks an awful lot like the Ladybug from Pt. Grey, http://www.ptgr...s/spherical.asp which has been around at least 2 years?
It all seem gimmicky. A good edit achieves far more, plus allows close ups so we can actually see something.
Olde news.
Agreed.
oldenews, what’s your twitter?
The PtGrey camera has been around alot longer than that. In fact Microsoft Research spec’d and funded the original back in 2002. See video here: http://research...groups/ivm/ivt/ Actually it’s sort of funny that MS demoed this tech so long ago and that they’ve never done anything with it. Google was able to leverage Microsoft’s tech faster than MS could: http://gizmodo....mera-283769.php
That was awesome. Their site url is great too.
Crazy technology, insane party. That was the Netherlands? Those Dutch know how to party.
It’s very cool. But Erick, you’re losing credibility when you call it 3D. Yes, it’s in their marketing materials, but it’s BS and as a tech journalist you should know better by now.
3D minimally requires something this video doesn’t have, and that’s depth (ideally, per pixel, per frame). Stereoscopic images are also fair to call 3D because our brains infer depth from that. It’s possible they’re doing either of those things, but I don’t see it from the video or the website.
What this is (or seems to be) is a basic panoramic 2D movie, projected into sphere for viewing. This has been done before but rarely in such a human-mobile unit. And the player+system is impressive for the image quality given how much more information needs to be in a panoramic movie than a basic flash one – usually 2-6x as many pixels being streamed and continuously at some FPS vs. only once per image bubble for each Street View position.
You are correct, this is NOT 3D. No one did their homework on this posting.
It is clearly NOT their camera, as pointed out by others, it is a Ladybug that has been painted yellow.
Stitching software and a Player are readily available through a Goog search to do this kind of work, if you have a Ladybug, but, perhaps they have their own. Regardless, I don’t see anything here that hasn’t been avail for years.
#slownewsday
love the Eric Prydz track
Looks to me to be simply a rebranded “LadyBug” from Point Grey? Just yellow instead of red? And indeed it is immersive but not yet 3D. 3D can be gottem from immersive video content but its overhead is a tad worrisome.
Yes, that was in my comment as well. Yellowbird may have some software for stitching, but it looks like the hardware is off the shelf from Pt. Grey. TECHCRUNCH should do a bit of research here? Not just post a press release?
I believe that after Google dumped Immersive Media, they also bought a bunch of Ladybugs, but, they opted against using video and did their own software. Video is way too cumbersome and also doesn’t actually allow a good User Experience for StreetView app, so they continued pulling one out of 90 or 120 frames (best guess?).
360 video was done by another company (can’t remember name?), maybe 5 years ago, for a Britney Speares concert and didn’t become a business then either, since companies shooting with multiple cameras and giving the user the option to bounce between cameras creates a far better experience.
I must agree with MidNightMapper and oldenews.
http://research...m/ivt/cga04.pdf
I don’t see the imbed. Safari 4.0.2.
this is incredible! i can’t wait to see this on more videos
Wasn’t this done in the late 90s around 1998 or so? What is the long term incentive for this tech? I still don’t get it 11 year later….
When are we going to get this for streaming video? Would be awesome for sports. Minus the crappy music.
This is extremely cool. This could be very interesting for music videos – imagine watching one of those “concert footage” videos with the ability to pan the view, and maybe even zoom in on things – it’d be almost like directing your own video a little bit.
So when is the Crunch cam going to be in 360?
This is very cool, but the technology and application has been available for some time now. Immersive Media has used this tech for at least a couple years.
I tried pushing this with an organization I was apart of that was looking for new business ideas. I really think you will see a lot more of this in the future. There is just no more realistic way of actually feeling like you are right there.
http://www.immersivemedia.com/
In addition to ease of use and image quality, you may want to reference price points?
You can buy a Ladybug camera, kluge some stitching software solutions together and create panoramic Flash in a Player for less than the price of a car. There are panoramic Flash Player codes avail. from developers @ no cost.
The alternatives? Try and get a quote from them! Use your money to go someplace FOR REAL, rather than a simulation! Regardless, what you overlook is that the human eye does not view everything in Wide Angle as it scans. These video simulations are contrary to the daily human visual experience. Even if they get HD 360, they will need a more intuitive interface to provide a satisfying experience.
Companies like EVERYSCAPE (who are commenting in this chain, but, not promoting themselves and I have NO affiliation) are developing solutions that address vast improvement of image quality for 360 imagery, without which, 360 video will go nowhere.
Like this a lot. I came across another 3D panoramic app on Facebook recently called “My 3D Scenes” (http://apps.fac...y-threed-scenes). This app lets you add your own photos and videos to a panoramic 3D scene with a simple mouse click and then auto-generates 3D slideshows and panoramas. Very cool and clearly there is a wave of richer media apps like Yellowbird too that will be pushing the envelope in how we all experience media.
Hyperlink here: http://apps.fac...y-threed-scenes.
Really cool video. The concept is not really hard to imagine though. Record in all directions from a single source from a bunch of cameras, then stitch together corresponding frames from all cameras. At least that’s how I would think they went about it. Pity the concept hasn’t been popularized yet. Wow, imagine it being done for Google street view using live cams. Kinda freaks me out thinking about it, basically watching everything everywhere live from your desktop. Though inevitably that day will come.
that’s my WOW of the week
A wee job they did for t-mobile in the UK http://www.tmob...galong360.co.uk
Thanks for the excellent link. Thousands of people singing Total Eclipse of the Heart and you’re part of the crowd, brought to you by TMobile- another use for 360° video I simply never would have thought of. We must now record next year’s world-wide Thriller Dance. Good fun and glad to see a corporate sponsor embracing the medium.
Finally, a great conversation about 360° video, even if it did start with yellowBird, a true start up that has produced an excellent demo, but I’ve not seen much else in the last six months.
Must agree with many of the informed comments here, but I would also point to the many focused efforts taking place in the 360° video world right now.
Music fans (Ilia) will be stunned at the interface that MATIvision has rolled out. Multiple cameras onstage, allowing viewers to navigate among four points of view. http://bit.ly/dHGPe
Also, stunning, full screen, branded, narrated, intuitively edited 360° videos are now up at http://bit.ly/HEoE7
It is a pity that this new visual medium hasn’t caught on sooner, but no model will succeed without demand, and demand comes from awareness. This conversation adds significant awareness that 360° video can take us anywhere we want to go and provide us the control of the experience that virtual reality promised. It’s up to us to want more. More at my 360videoblog
I see that many comments reference this all being a somewhat old technology that really hasn’t, and perhaps won’t ever, achieve a wide use.
It requires too much work from the Viewer.
The images you link to are either choppy, have buffering issues or are just terribly blurred or poorly lit. The inability to actually see any detail level in faces makes this unsuitable for commercial applications.
It’s not worth the effort. Sorry.
Agreed that there are issues, it could be and should be better, depending on a number of factors.
I must disagree with your conclusion though. Early internet video had many of the same problems, and the world community found it worth the effort to resolve them.
Many viewers enjoy the interactivity, as exampled by the many favorable comments here and everywhere 360° video has been discussed online.
This is a new medium and there is a lot of room for creatively overcoming the obvious hurdles.
Early internet video happened something like 14 years ago? Thumbnail size QT and Real @ 10fps.
Sure, maybe 360 video online in 14 years will be reasonable to watch, but think about all of the early online video companies (pre-bubble) that Failed (with millions poured into them) and how even in the past half year there have been massive Failures in the internet video space. YouTube loses 1/2 billion$/annually, so I don’t think you want to promote and rely on the industry trends, unless you are backed by some VC funds that will allow you to ride out the next 14 years.
It does seem that there are applications for this kind of technology that would be interesting to consider, if and when the image quality allows visual clarity and the ability to intuitively navigate.
In addition to poor looking video (when all other online video keeps looking better), the other problem is that it just takes too much work for the user, unless there is some clear benefit and value for having to click and drag? I could see the same scene via traditional video with quick cuts and a good edit, with great quality, far far faster and without having to focus my attention on clicking and dragging.
Don’t make me work for my experience unless you give me something more than I could get faster and easier through traditional routes. Claiming this is a “new medium” and we should be forgiving overlooks the fact that the 360 video medium has been around for what? At least five years? More? If anyone cared, they’d have cared already.
Let’s revisit this in 14 years, at which time you’ll probably be right and I’ll be wrong.
should be accquired by Google soon!
Cool! It’s good equipment for street reporter. But the URL is too long. Why?
Short version: http://yb.nl
That’s a ladybug camera, not their own. And yes, it’s not 3d – spherical yes, but 3d no.
At any rate, nice work guys
And the price is a bit steep – 1000 Euros for 2 minutes IIRC. You should be able to buy a spherical video camera for that much
Microsoft should have licensed this for their RoundTable offering.
Anyone notice the guy giving the finger at the :57 second mark? He is to the cameraman’s right. Sroll downa and around until you find the cameraman/camera. Anyhow, it made me wonder how much fun (not!) editing this type of video would be…
Anyone notice the guy giving the finger at the :57 second mark? He is to the cameraman’s right. Sroll downa and around until you find the cameraman/camera. Anyhow, it made me wonder how much fun (not!) editing this type of video would be…
Anyone notice the guy giving the finger at the :57 second mark? He is to the cameraman’s right. Sroll downa and around until you find the cameraman/camera. Anyhow, it made me wonder how much fun (not!) editing this type of video would be…
I completely agree with the comments regarding audience willingness to get off their collective, centuries old butts and interact with the images they see before them… For all the time of audiences viewing what artists create (think cavemen/women), we have been forced to see only what is intended… This has formed DNA chains that lock our attention forward on one place and ask nothing more than to be inspired by what we see… Until someone asked themself the simple question – why can’t I decide what I want to look at ? With that, for the first time in history, the ability to choose where you look is now possible… It is no less than a paradigm shift in how we experience imagery. It will not go away and is actually further down the road in technological parity with traditional video than many know… Stick figures to HD – the birth of what will be is as it should be – slow and painful.
Filmmakers allow the audience to “look around” all the time and focus the audience on things they’d never see in a blurred wide angle and unevenly lit 360. There is a language to film that creates story and art…it is a creative process, from news to movies.
These 360 cameras are glorified security cameras and don’t have much use beyond that. Clever, sure. Valuable, doubtful.
Humans don’t “look around” as they move through their day, they actually see vis a vis broad pans, then they adjust their focus from near to far on specific objects, generally moving in a forward direction.
A lot like the way a film is constructed. It’s why the visual language of film seems natural.
360 video is cool for all of about twenty seconds, after that it’s time to move on.
Still images in the 360 format are different than video, the image clarity is improving drastically and the audience can actually explore in the way they “see” in real life. Which is why StreetView rocks.
Let’s face it this kind of technology has been around for awhile and if it was really great then Lucas would have jumped all over it. No real Director or filmmaker cares about this stuff. But, it does seem great as a Security camera if the resolution improves.
Transmedia is reshaping every Hollywood franchise and the key to engaging the audience across multiple platforms is interactivity. Think Lost. I know a lot of fans that would love to experience 360 video from the set in even a behind-the-scenes extra or content supplement online.
The power of this isn’t really looking around at everything anyway. Sometimes it is simply fantastic just to have the capability of seeing just beyond the frame, to follow your interest.
360 video doesn’t threaten the film industry any more than the internet has threatened it. It is just becoming available as another tool in the transmedia toolbox for the franchise.
“transmedia” is a term applied to telling stories across multiple platforms.
for example: tv, sms, online video, web content, experiential/events, etc. where the User/audience picks up pieces and threads of the story in different places to create a more complete picture.
using the term “transmedia” in the context you used it doesn’t make sense and is a misuse of the term. it’s about “transmedia story telling.”
so, to your point, yes, I suppose content allied to a story could also incorporate 360 video? but, what and why?
the imagery is either blurred or so terribly or dark and badly lit you can’t see anything…close ups are unheard of…facial recognition is atrocious (and, if we can’t see the actors faces, we don’t care about the rest)…the little bit of zoom I’ve seen renders an even poorer image.
my point is: why bother?
you could achieve a far better experience with a 2 or 3 camera set up and multi-screen simulated viewing experience. you could shape an interactive video experience that allows great quality imagery (using trained professionals who know how to tell visual stories) and great opportunities to engage users in “transmedia story.”
sorry, i’m just not drinking the same kool aid. if this were going to have been a business, it would have been one five years ago. #deadpool
I think the point is that the film industry isn’t threatened (as you imagine) by 360 video, it just doesn’t see any good reason to adopt it. Maybe some day, but, not today.
Just the fact that you have separated yourself from film industry means that you aren’t a film professional, correct?
You feel you are competitive with a hundred year old Industry? With a security camera?
Something I haven’t seen noted in the comments: It’s not about the equipment honey, it’s about the person behind it (or, for 360 video, I guess under it?). People make the visual arts have value, you can do it with a Flip camera, a 35 and maybe someday with a 360? Cameras come and go, but, the real value lies in those who use them. I haven’t seen anything in 360 video that wouldn’t have been a better user experience through simpler and less costly formats. Maybe it’s the wrong people using them?
Marcie, that is indeed a possibility.
Ralph, still not sure how I misused the term, but thanks for the clarification. “What and Why” are questions I look forward to seeing answered. Done well, I think this could add value and help tell a story. Sorry, you disagree, but at least you’ve seen it. Too few have, in my opinion.
Oh those Dutch, they love a good party.
Now we can join them.