Facebook and RED are teaming up to develop a professional grade camera which can be used with a virtual reality headset. This virtual reality camera would be able to capture high-resolution images in 6DoF, which is 6 degrees of freedom, by which it can be viewed and explored in real time using virtual reality.
This camera was announced at Facebook’s F8 Developer conference. This camera is the outcome of Facebook’s efforts on its Surround 360 platform. Brian Cabral, a director of engineering at Facebook specializing in computational photography said this
A year ago we set out to find a hardware partner to help us deliver this technology. Facebook needed not just “the image quality we wanted,” but also the workflow that would let creators easily capture necessary photography and video on set, and be able to transfer that to the necessary software that would then stitch it together and help create VR-ready experiences, or what Cabral calls a “photon to photon” experience.
Facebook has come up with a Surround 360 prototype earlier, including the spec sheet and hardware design document, and it was open source, and this device included 17 cameras for a VR capture.
Facebook wanted to help tech manufacturing companies to actually produce a product like this and help video creators to create more VR friendly content. Facebook, on the other hand, focused more on the VR creation.
Now that Facebook has partnered with RED, it seems Facebook has found an ideal manufacturer to focus on the VR capable camera as RED is one of the leading manufacturers to provide high-end cameras and are equipped well to push high-end VR capability cameras.
The price of such camera is not announced yet, but RED cameras are usually priced high $5,000 to $50,000, so we can expect this camera to be priced a bit high.
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