Seamless Stitching
The Yi Halo would be similar to other 360 camera arrays out there today, except that it’s specially designed for the Jump Assembler. The Assembler is Google’s cloud-based automated stitching process which turns the footage from the Halo’s 17 cameras into 3D 360 output which has impressive seamless stitching.
“The camera combined with the stitching algorithm is the best 360 video solution in the industry,” said Jay Spangler, Executive VR Producer for Two Bit Circus.
With 360 cameras, the videos from each individual view needs to be merged together to create the spherical view. Often times this is done manually, with someone tweaking alignments by hand. It’s a tedious process which often reveals the seams between cameras (where one camera view merges into another) which causes distortions in the final video output that can be visually jarring and downright immersion breaking.
Google’s Jump Assembler not only automates the stitching process—which 360 content creators say saves a ton of time and money—but it does so with the most seamless output I’ve seen from any stitching process. As subjects walk near to the camera (and thus pass through many of the camera’s individual views in quick succession), which is perhaps the most challenging moment for most stitching processes, you’ll be hard pressed to see where one camera view ends and the next picks up.
As importantly (if not more so), the Jump Assembler spits out 3D 360 video which is critical for immersion when viewing 360 video in a VR headset. This is not a trivial feat. Creating good-looking 360 stereo video is not easy, not to mention when you’re dealing with overlapping frame stitching that you hope to remain seamless. Google has pulled this off in a very impressive way with the Assembler and says that stitched footage can be returned “within hours,” saving creators a ton of time in the process, thereby putting 3D capture within arm’s reach of a greater number of productions.
Positioning vs. Volumetric VR Cameras
That’s all well and good, but how does the Yi Halo fit in with volumetric video cameras (which can capture much more immersive VR footage) like the Lytro Immerge and Facebook’s newly announced X24?
Google says that the Yi Halo is of a different production class; whereas the Immerge and X24, the company says, are high-end devices made for high-end productions with lots of post-production and VFX work, the Halo is meant for mid-range productions where a creator needs a portable and reliable camera that’s simple operate, and outputs footage that fits within their existing toolset. The difference, the company alluded, is like shooting against a green screen with a high-end cinema camera vs. a more rugged and portable camera that you’d take on-site.
That said, Google could potentially get into the volumetric capture game. The Jump Assembler is already capable of producing depth-maps (one important piece of volumetric capture), though they aren’t presently returning volumetric video entirely. We inquired about volumetric capture but the company was tight-lipped on what it might do in the future.
A Leap, In Some Aspects
Thanks to its reliability, cohesive components, portability, and broad operating specs, the Yi Halo may represent a big step forward as far as the content creator is concerned. But when it comes to the end user, the Halo is just like a lot of other 360 cameras we’ve seen: there’s still a long way to go in visual quality.
You can see output from the Halo, crunched with the Assembler, right here (to watch in VR, see the instructions in this article). Having watched this played back through a Daydream headset on a Pixel phone, to my eyes there’s a major lack of dynamic range on the low end, resulting in dark colors being very hard to discern from one another.
Without a side-by-side test, the quality of the image doesn’t feel sharper than some of the better 3D 360 footage that we’ve seen before, though the seamless stitching is a big improvement over a lot of other 360 content out there.
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The Yi Halo appears to be exactly what 360 video creators need: an affordable, reliable, cohesive 360 camera system that makes capturing high-quality 3D 360 video easier than ever before. With automated and seamless stitching, the Halo is poised to allow creators to better focus on what’s being filmed, not the intricacies of how it’s being filmed.
The Yi Halo begins limited availability today (check out the website for more info) and will go on sale more broadly this summer.
