Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality have been gaining traction and adoption at exponential rates. In my opinion, they will be major disrupters for many, if not all, industries, particularly gaming, fitness and on-hands skill training for example.

But one area that particularly interests me is video recording. I enjoy recording family events, precious moments and even my driving trips (for liability protection, with the use of a dash cam). When dash cameras first started becoming popular in USA about a decade ago, I felt they did the job but didn’t necessarily capture the entire picture. At best, cameras claim to be wide-angle, and unfortunately that’s their hard limitation.

Since then, we’ve seen 360 cameras being introduced. Most of them work by means of utilizing dual cameras, 180 degrees each, that can then stitch the videos for 360 degree interactive viewing.

It would be exciting to take that another step further. Imagine, you are at a family event, or on an adventure. Your friends or family or subjects of interest are not necessarily in the primary focus area of the camera. Perhaps they are behind you, to the left. Or at the very edge of the 180degree seams of your 360 degree surrounding. When you go to recollect that moment, it’ll be far from the actual, original view. There are obvious reasons for this. By Using just 2 cameras, even with the modern sophisticated software to stitch frames together, you’ll find that the image is skewed, distorted or even relatively lower resolution in certain areas. What you REALLY want, is to be able to relive that very moment that you have on video without the obvious missing gaps and distortions.

Luckily, this is possible, with the integration of 2 technologies. A VR Kit and a better 360 Camera. The solution would be to increase the number of cameras from 2, to maybe 4 in the 360 degree camera unit. Now, each camera has a 90 degree reach. Although this may require more processing power to seam the frames together, the image would come out cleaner with less distortions, and less of a need for complex computations to account for and render the angles to fit a square frame. So, now you have a 360 degree camera, perfectly capable of capturing in full resolution, all angles in your immediate 360 degree radius.

Couple this with a VR headset and sensors, and what you get is the ability to view your recording as if you’re back in time of that recording. As you turn your head to your right, or left, or turn around completely, you gain the ability to literally re-live what that moment was like.

This ability, to view all the expressions and interactions of people around you, from first person view, on-demand, will certainly be a game-changer for both the future of VR and 360 cameras.