In recent years, manufacturers have redoubled their enthusiasm to take ownership of the market for virtual reality headsets (VR - Virtual Reality in English). While most of the first headsets released had almost the same characteristics, other manufacturers began to stand out by providing their devices with 360-degree vision capabilities. Very quickly, many manufacturers have embarked on this new race. Many users, including gamers have indeed welcomed these headsets.
However, some users and even manufacturers have realized that these 360-degree headsets have not only advantages. In addition to being expensive, these headphones require the user to turn his head to capture the entire scene around him if he wants to record with this mode. Since not all users want to see 360-degree scenes, some builders have begun to think of another model of cameras: recording videos and photos in 180-degree 3D to capture only the frontal scene. .
Google, which has been launching virtual reality headsets for several years, has also adopted this new format for recording videos and photos. This has resulted in the introduction of the VR180 camera standard since last year to capture photos and videos in 2D and 3D at 180 degrees. To provide users with this new type of camera, Google has partnered with some partners and for some time the cameras of Lenovo and Yi Horizon are available on the dedicated page of Google.
According to the Mountain View company, these VR180 cameras are advantageous in that they allow "the creators to take immersive photos and videos in three dimensions using affordable cameras, small enough to fit in your pocket." After capturing 180-degree scenes with VR180 cameras, users can use the popular VR headsets including the Google Cardboard Cardboard VR Reality Headset to view recordings in an immersive environment.
After making the recordings, some people might want to make edits of the VR content. To meet this demand, Google has announced the availability of VR180 Creator, an application for editing videos recorded with VR180 cameras. According to the Google release, VR180 Creator currently has two features for editing VR videos: conversion for publishing and conversion to standardized equirect projection. In short if you do not have professional video editing software, VR180 Creator appears as the perfect companion for these tasks.
For those who are interested in the VR180 Creator application, you should know that it is available only for Linux and macOS. As some may be surprised, it is actually not available for Windows users. While most of the software vendor applications are available on these three platforms (Windows, MacOS and Linux), this time Google has decided to publish its software only for macOS and Linux. What could this omission hide?
