Enthusiast level VR content creation just got a serious kick in the pants, as Sphericam just passed it’s $150,000 Kickstarter goal to bring a 4k 360-degree camera to consumers for under $1500 with 23 days left to go. Using six cameras, Sphericam boasts some pretty impressive features like a global shutter, 60FPS, a portable and durable form factor, live stitching, streaming, the ability to shoot in RAW, GPS, and a whole lot more.
Other than 4k, one of Sphericam’s killer features is the ability to live stream. In today’s social media landscape of Periscoping and Meerkatting live streaming is king and it seems like Sphericam will be able to do it well. Promising 30FPS livestreamed, stitched full resolution video. Imagine the headlines of the near future when people start sneaking these into games and live streaming from their seats. You thought the Periscoping scandal at the Pacquiao-Mayweather fight was bad…
The camera is actually the second from founder Jeffery Martin, who also launched a successful 360 camera Kickstarter back in 2012 for the first iteration of the Sphericam. According the Martin, “Sphericam 2 is a huge, dramatic improvement from Sphericam 1 in every aspect.” We sat down with him to learn a bit more about the technical details of the camera, which Ryan Damm will be flushing out a bit more thoroughly later. One of the things that will be incredibly important to the enthusiast community is the ability to manually set the exposure, a common feature among many standard cameras. According to Martin, “I have always been very displeased with the lack of control over the cameras that I own. This camera will be different.” The camera will also provide “native ISO to around 3200” which is pretty important for those looking to shoot at night, or to shoot things that are moving very quickly.
Content creation is going to be one of the biggest keys to virtual reality’s ultimate success. Once people get past the initial “wow” factor they want content – and tools like this, will help to fill the void of the enthusiast level community that have built online content platforms like Youtube. With Google Jump taking on a prosumer market and Jaunt taking on the professional, it appears there is one big market left empty, casual consumers – the Instagrammers of the world. It will be interesting to see how that segment develops in the coming years. No matter what though, this is fantastic news for the content creation community.
