The future of outdoor sports video seems to be heading towards a 360 degree point of view. We have seen many panoramic and even spherical imagery of outdoors spaces but never before video. With all the focus on point of view video cameras lately, Sony Ericsson teamed up with Xperia Studio to highlight the creative power of the lowly smartphone.
As the video subject, the project team enlisted Mark Sevenoff to mountain bike the entire Slickrock Trail in Moab. Instead of using fancy GoPro HD Hero cameras, Xperia Studio rigged together six Sony Ericsson Android mobile phones to capture every angle of the ride.
The smartphones were handlebar mounted on a custom 3D printed plastic rigging. A specially designed bluetooth remote control software enabled the video recording to be stopped and started from a seventh smartphone.
With no commercial software available for stitching together the 6 separate videos after the ride, Joergens Geerds from Xperia had to make do with software used for processing still images. In order to use this software, the videos had to first be broken up into hundreds of thousands of jpeg images.
The final result of the Sony Ericsson-Xperia project is an interactive video that allows you to replay the entire ride from numerous points of view, while rotating to any angle as the video plays. To check out this extremely cool 360 degree video, head on over to the Xperia Studio site.
Xperia Studio plans to eventually release the smartphone control and processing software on Github so you can play around with 360 degree video as well. Now all you need is 6 smartphones or 6 point of view cameras and a homemade mounting rig.
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