14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook made a new big announcement during its F8 developers conference, introducing the second generation of the Surround 360 video camera design.
This time, the company seems pretty serious about helping potential customers to purchase it as an actual product, which wasn't really possible the last time around.
The Surround 360 was originally unveiled last year as an open-source spec guide for other people to build themselves. This upset many people who were more than ready to pay for such a camera, but not really into putting it together themselves.
The new model is called x24, because it has 24 cameras arranged in the form of an orb. The original version featured 17 cameras.
There is also a smaller version called x6, with just six cameras. This one is, obviously, a lot more manageable.
Facebook wants to make and sell the cameras
Unlike last year, Facebook won't be releasing the schematics online. Instead, it wants to team up with a group of hardware partners to manufacture and sell the finished products sometime this year. Obviously, the company found another way to make a dollar, even if it doesn't necessarily plan to put any "Facebook" stickers on the product.
The new 360 cameras aren't just an upgrade over last year's designs, but they also bring extra features. The x24 and the x6 capture 8K-quality scenes with six degrees of freedom (6DOF). This means that your body can move forward, backward, up, down, left and right as long as you're wearing a VR headset with positional tracking.
"We capture and then we can estimate depth. We actually compute for every pixel where it is in the scene," said Brian Cabral, engineering director at Facebook, leading the Surround 360 development.
Facebook further plans to give developers the ability to create more engaging videos by editing live-action captures with CGI imagery. It will be possible to reformat for different platforms so it will be easier to get it edited.
It is unknown yet just how much the new devices will cost. The original Surround 360 was estimated to cost about $30,000 if the company's exact schematics were used. Hopefully, the new cameras will be marketed for less.