After Gear VR Samsung debuted Project Beyond at the Developer Conference 2014 — Project beyond is a 360-degree camera that captures everything around it in 3D. A gigapixel of 3D footage is captured every second, and it can stream it back to someone wearing Samsung’s Gear VR headset, getting them closer the near realistic virtual world.By default, Project Beyond camera continuously records and creates a virtual 3D environment of wherever it is placed — Samsung claims that people could tune in live or record the streamed footage so that they can view it any time. It could in some way be compared to the cameras which Google uses for its Google Street View backpack, but only smaller. Samsung has already taken the camera all around San Francisco and other locations in California to record footage so that it can be viewed with the Samsung Gear VR , and the company showed it off at the Developer Conference, Where visitors were asked to be able to wear the Gear VR headset and experience some of the footage that’s been recorded with this camera, right after the developer conference.
Some of the users who said that Samsung let them view a pre-recorded footage recorded on Project Beyond. “The experience was a very engaging experience. But i wouldn’t call it the best, they still have a long way to go.” He also said that he was able to look up and down like in the real world and the feel of it was great and it didn’t feel like . There were a couple of instances when the illusions gave way. You would want to move forward and walk around the virtual world, but here’s the problem, Project Beyond is a stationary camera, and it can record only as far as it can see.
A user also quoted saying that “the quality of the video itself wasn’t quite as great as I was hoping for, either — there’s noise and grain in the quality of video, than I expected, given the relatively high resolution output of the Gear VR headset. (That said, I haven’t used the Gear VR in any other setting yet, so these issues might not be unique to the Project Beyond footage). Also, the lack of audio definitely kept me from forgetting where I was — hearing the crowded trade show hall around me just didn’t match up with the video.
Regardless, there’s little question that Samsung will be able to create some compelling virtual environments with Project Beyond — and while there’s no word on when the camera might make its way into the hands of the average consumer (if it ever does), it could be a big step forward to solving the problem of where VR content will come from.
