More Immersive 360 Degree VR Video: Facebook Surround 360 and Adobe Sidewinder

by markus · 2017-10-29

Earlier this year, Facebook and OTOY revealed a new recording technique to combine 360 degree video with depth information. The football-sized sphere contains 24 cameras (there’s also a smaller version with just 6 cameras), allows the recording of 360 degree virtual reality video with 6 degrees of freedom, making it possible for viewers to not only turn their head and look around themselves while locked into the fixed position of the camera, but move around slightly in the scene.

Now, at the Adobe MAX creator’s conference in Las Vegas, Adobe has unveiled project Sidewinder, an experimental software tool which creates a very similar effect based on just two camera views.

In the presentation, the software uses depth information from stereoscopic 360 degree video – that is, fixed-point VR content with slightly different views for each eye – and extrapolates what the same footage would look like from slightly different positions. Given that this is purely software-based, the results shown below are impressive.

Sidewinder was demoed as one of several software “Sneak Peaks”, so it’s unclear if the software will make it to the market in the forseeable future, but we certainly hope it will!