As mentioned on TechCrunch today, a company in the Netherlands called Yellowbird is debuting a video technology that lets the user pan and tilt through a 360 degree video stream in real time. It may not be totally groundbreaking, but a pretty cool application nonetheless. It’s much like the 360 degree view you get in Google Maps’ street view or those ‘virtual’ home real estate tours. Except instead of a still image, it’s video. There are other 360 degree video options out there, but Yellowbird takes it mobile in backpack form.
Now, it’s pretty cool to be able to pan and tilt to see what is happening on all sides of the camera, but your navigation is still locked in to the axis. You can’t change your vantage point. The position or motion of the 360 camera was set by the operator when the video was shot, and there you have it.
But if this is an age of innovation, it is also an age of integration. Systems and functionality from disparate products are being combined at an amazing rate. There are some other cool innovations that could stairstep on a technology like Yellowbird’s — or vice-versa. Microsoft has been developing a product for some time now called Photosynth. If you have overlapping photos of a location, Photosyth automagically creates a virtual map of the area, allowing you to zoom in and out and change your vantage point from image to image. If there are enough images, you can almost get a sense of motion by navigating between them.
Can you imagine what it would be like to apply image processing technology like Photosynth to a bunch of high resolution Yellowbird streams? A user would not only be able to pan and tilt, as in the Yellowbird app, but also change perspective from one stream to the other seamlessly. With enough streams, the environment would become completely navigable, completely immersive. To even begin to apply Photosynth-like processing to multiple video streams would require an inordinate amount of processing power by 2009 standards. But as long as Moore’s Law holds up, we may have real-time, truly 3D navigable video in the not too distant future.
The potential implications for visualisation, surveillance, and entertainment are almost mind boggling.