Facebook’s new 360 VR rig sports 14 cameras, looks like a flying saucer

Seems Facebook is really stepping up its VR game, and have just announced a new 360 VR camera rig called the Facebook Surround 360. And it looks like an alien spacecraft.

Announced at their annual F8 developer conference, the Surround 360 camera sports a good 14 cameras on its edge, including one fish-eye camera and two cameras pointing downwards. The array is designed to create “truly spherical video” and can capture the stereoscopic images that 3D needs to to complete the illusion.

Captured footage will be rendered online via a web-based software that’s made just for it. Said software will then stitch together the video from the footage from each individual camera in 4K, 6K and 8K formats. The software apparently will also be available to use on similar 360 rigs, and won’t be proprietary to Facebook’s Surround 360.

Video from this rig of course, is destined for the Oculus Rift which was acquired by Facebook not too long back. Its also not the first 360 degree rig out there, with brands like GoPro having adopted the technology earlier on.

As cool as it looks, Facebook won’t be selling the rig, but the designs for the array will be available on GitHub this summer.

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