NAB Show Goes 360 Degrees

LAS VEGAS—If virtual reality was not the star of the 2016 NAB Show, judging by the size of the crowds at the Virtual and Augmented Reality Pavilion in the North hall, VR was a strong supporting character. Even just the highlights required a full day to explore.

The Pavilion was curated by Kaleidoscope, who was called in by NAB to help gather the best VR experiences from around the world.

“What we find most exciting are VR experiences that fall somewhere between a movie and a game,” said René Pinnell, the founder of Kaleidoscope, which describes itself as a “global community of developers, filmmakers, technologists.” “We had stations set up where visitors could view 30 VR experiences on either Oculus Rift, HTC Vive or Samsung Gear VR headsets. These were all gathered from our recently completed world tour that took us to 10 cities from Europe to Asia and Australia.”

THE SPHERICAL SPACE
Tim Dashwood, founder of Dashwood Cinema Solutions, was in the VR Pavilion with his 360 VR Toolbox that, among other things, provides a plug-in for viewing VR projects on an Oculus Rift headset that had been created with Adobe Premiere CC, After Effects CC or Apple Final Cut Pro. It also lets you project 2D images on the inside of a 3D sphere. “This year we also showed off a brand new 3D, 360-degree rendering environment,” Dashwood said. “It can take any image on any plane and position it in spherical space. Think the opening scroll from ‘Star Wars’ in VR and you’ll get the idea.”

Kodak PIXPRO SP360 VR camera

JK Imaging, Ltd, the worldwide licensee for Kodak PIXPRO Digital Cameras & Devices was there with the new SP360 4K VR Camera.

“This year we had our new 1080p version that records a 235-degree field of view,” said Tracy Christall, director of marketing at JK Imaging Ltd. “Mounting two of these cameras back-to-back on a drone you can get a full 360-degree view with the overlap eliminating the camera mount and any drone propellers from the spherical view.”

Available with the SP360 camera is complimentary PIXPRO Desktop Editing Software and their NEW PIXPRO Stitch Software, which facilitates stitching two SP360 4K video files into a virtual sphere.

Last April, Santa Clara, Calif.-based VR company VOKE scored a major milestone in VR history by presenting the NCAA Final Four Semifinals and National Championship in virtual reality for the first time as a 180-degree live 2D stream. Fans could follow the game by using Samsung Gear VR powered by Oculus.

So of course this VR footage from March Madness was a main attraction for VOKE at the pavilion, according to Uma Jayaram, VOKE’s executive vice president and COO.

“The exciting thing was that viewers got an immersive experience seeing the game directly from courtside,” he said. “We have our own proprietary camera system which we think is optimized for sporting events since its 180 degree view is the way people are accustomed to watching games. It also means the data from the view behind you is not wasted so it can be used for other fun bits of sports data information.”