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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

Looks great, though as other commenters have pointed out, 16 GoPros makes for an expensive rig.

I've been watching this space for a while and pretty much all of the consumer varieties (usually Kickstarter-backed) have pretty terrible video quality, so it looks like I'll be sitting this one out for a while yet.

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They don't claim this to be a consumer product.

As others have said, the cost of this is peanuts compared to professional cameras.

I'd bet one of the first killer-apps for VR will be sports: Imagine several of these rigs set up around (and over) a football field, so that spectators can choose to "be" at the right point on the field to observe the game, and have complete freedom to look around the field.

I think you'd be surprised how nice it is to have a team of producers and camera operators doing the work of finding the interesting views for you. People attend live sports for the atmosphere and shared experience, not the view.

Though a court side camera at a basketball game would make an interesting vantage point... People definitely do sit court side for the view.

That's true - but for my preferred sport (motorcycle racing) sometimes it'd be _really_ nice to not have to "settle" for the producers choices of what to see (that last MotoGP race had, from memory, 3 critical overtaking manoeuvres happen while the producer had decided to cut away to showing the team/girlfriend in the pit garage). We don't have the bandwidth (yet), but I dream of the day when there's a cluster of camera arrays (similar to that 16 GoPro rig) at every on track vantage point (the current camera locations would be fine to start with), with a few hundred video streams coming out of the race track and the option to use whatever smart software you can buy/subscribe-to/write, or even maybe get a curated feed from someone other than the on-track producer. The World Superbike Championship telecast is already using some pretty good image processing software to paint real-time telemtery overlays onto a bike in the video feed - it's still making mistakes, but it's pretty impressively good considering it's happening honest-to-god-live. (I can't find any public videos to link to there, sorry - Dorna are obviously really good about sending takedown notices to Youtube, and all the good video on their own site is behind their paywall...)

How is Google going to be involved though? They don't have the licenses for sports casting.

I'll take your bet - how much? - I doubt TV networks are going to do anything with it and if they do, they won't be licensing it from Google.

It might be more cost-effective to use the Xiaomi Yi

http://www.engadget.com/2015/04/29/xiaomi-yi-camera-versus-g...

16 gopros isn't much more than a mid-range Canon DSLR, which TONS of amateurs manage to pony up the cash for.

I don't think price will be a big inhibitor here, honestly.

Price is a huge inhibitor for a mid-range Canon DSLR, so it'll probably be a huge inhibitor for this system too.

Yeah but compare it to a Red or a Hasselblad and it's utter peanuts.

Oh certainly, I just wanted to make the point that photography is a notoriously expensive hobby to begin with.

Uhhmm... how much do you think gopro 4's cost?

About $2000

ahahha what? more like $8,000

It's an open spec. Use Rasberry Pi and camera modules. Buy 'em used. You can probably build the rig for <$1500

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