Why are 180º VR videos superior to 360º videos?
These days very few VR porn production companies release 360º videos, with 180º scenes making the vast majority of releases. There are a number of reasons for this, largely that 360º videos are inferior to 180º releases. Let’s take a look at the technical reasons for this.
The latest 360º videos arrive at SLR at 6400px6400x 30FPS and are then interpolated up to 60FPS. But because these specs overwhelm the maximum capacity of the NVidia 10xx and 20xx graphics cards (which have a limit of 8192x8192x30) we have to either downscale it to around 5700x5700x60 or cut it in half making them 180º videos - with 6400x3200x60 the highest resolution for 180º video.
360º technology is defunct for these key reasons:
- The current stitching algorithms create numerous distortions around moving objects that are filmed at a 0-2m distance from the camera.
- It has a dead area at around 0-30cm in between each of the cameras used in the 360º filming.
- The current generation of headsets display a 100-110º FOV which is almost half of your natural viewing area in everyday life. This requires you to move much more in VR to catch up with 360º environment, making it very unnatural.
- The maximum consumer hardware decoders (the Nvidia 10xx and 20xx graphic cards) cannot process more than 5778x5778x60FPS. We expect to have this resolved in April with viewport adaptive streaming (this allows up to 10K resolution on any device, it has already been implemented for Android phones, iPhones will be next).
With Viewport streaming, the video is cut into multiple pieces in the cloud and some sections of these are played simultaneously in the area you are exactly looking at. It switches instantly to other pieces following the movement of your head. It also grants additional zoom, requires much less bandwidth, means there’s no overheating of your phone and extends your battery life.
It’s already available on the SLR app for Android-based setups like OculusGo, GearVR, Daydream and Cardboard and the upcoming Oculus Quest. iPhone and Windows support is expected in March/April 2019.
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