360-degree media about to become much more important thanks to Oculus Quest (and soon, Apple AR)

David Hoptman carries around six GoPros on the end of a monopod, sets it down, and captures the world in 360-degrees. The photo on the top of the page is from one of his videos in the VR Gallery at https://invirovr.com.

As I talked with him yesterday I was viewing them, both on the Web, and in my Oculus Rift VR headset. His work is stunning. It's like being inside an Ansel Adams photograph, except it's video. Birds chirp. Leaves flutter. Water flows by. Waves ebb and flow.

My mind was calmer, the same way it gets calm on a walk in Yosemite or Yellowstone. There's science behind this, too, at the University of Washington they discovered that VR can take away pain better than opiates can.

As I watched I felt like I was inside an Apple billboard. You know, those billboards of photos that people have shot on their iPhones around the world. Except that this billboard wasn't a rectangle you drive by. It's one you are in.

This kind of work is painstaking, I learned, by talking with him. It isn't enough to simply buy a 360-degree camera, like I have. David researches spots that would make for great 360-degree videos, travels the world, captures the scene at a beautiful time and light, and then goes home and uses software to stitch the videos together, then does a ton of work to adjust exposure and make the videos extremely high quality. Keep in mind, I was watching a low-resolution version in a headset that only has 1k displays. His cameras have captured source material that could generate videos for displays much sharper in the future.

Which gets me to the Oculus Quest. It will ship sometime between now and the end of June, will cost $399. Why do I see it as important for 360 degree video. No, not because it's 6DOF (which means you can move around in video games) but because I expect it will be finally the VR headset that gets many of you into the magical world I've been talking about for years now. I believe it will sell very well because you don't need to be tied to a PC, because it doesn't require a dedicated room to play in, and because everything is self-contained in a real VR headset. Yeah, 6DOF isn't important for this kind of media. Yet. But it's important for everything else, and it's finally a system I can recommend to my friends to have their first VR experiences in. (That's why I don't suggest the Oculus Go, a similar $200 headset, but one that only does 3DOF, which means you can't play most of the games, or use any of the other "real" VR stuff that's out there).

Yeah, you will want to play Job Simulator, Beat Saber, and a raft of other video games. Yeah, you'll want to try out Google Earth VR or Tiltbrush, along with many many other apps.

But one thing you'll probably fall back to is experiencing the world of 360-degree videos. There are tons on YouTube, and even entire search engines for them. We'll talk more after the Quest comes out.

That said, you'll be hearing a lot more about 360-degree media over the next few years. Why? The cameras are getting way better. I'm carrying around an Insta360 Evo that costs about $400 and it's an amazing way to capture the world -- it works with my iPhone and doesn't even need to be carried too steadily since algorithms make sure that the video is always aimed the right way and others smooth out the motion. Really amazing technology inside a little box that you carry around on a stick. Algorithms remove the stick from the videos, so it looks like you, the viewer, are floating in air. You'll see us use it on our YouTube Channel starting next week as we take videos around the tech world and show you inside labs and companies in a new way. That's an aside, though.

Some of what you'll see happen in VR is new collaborative spaces where we can work together. Why does that need to be done in a conference room, though? I'd love to meet inside a forest one day, and have a meeting on a beach the next.

I do wonder what the business model is? David found one: hospitals. Being in a hospital is dismal. All these machines beeping. People walking around not giving you any privacy. Well, soon, you'll be able to put a headset on and be in a nice serene forest.

I see another business model: conferences with thousands of people always need amazing new content to put up on the increasingly high-resolution screens that are wrapping around audiences at places like VMWorld or Salesforce's Dreamforce. There will be an increasing demand for work like David's, with very high quality production values (you'll notice that in his videos he's not even in them, he works hard to get out of the scene so you can look around and never see a human. It's like you have a forest all to yourself in his work).

Oh, and wait until Apple enters this space. I'm expecting that Apple will make an increasingly big deal about 360 as it brings augmented reality glasses to the market over the next two or three years. Why? Because Apple understands that experiences will be hugely important. Where am I going with this?

As I viewed more of David's work in my VR headset I wanted to go to those places and see them in real life. This is how travel will be sold. And real estate and more.

Because it's fairly affordable to generate 360-degree content, you'll see a lot more interest. Thanks to the Quest, and soon others, you'll be able to experience this new world and get why I am so excited. But Apple knows that most people just want to capture selfies, which gets us to the next point.

Making an image, or videos, of yourself is about to radically change, as I demonstrate here by sticking my Insta360 Evo out the window of my car with a monopod. Note that I did this while my Tesla was self driving on a freeway between Silicon Valley and Los Angeles.

This image shows the power of 360-degree cameras to show you in your world in a way that simply was impossible a few years ago.

David's work shows that billions of people will now be able to visit natural beauty they would never have dreamed of visiting before.

That's a good thing and I can't wait for you to discover it!

In the meantime, it'd be great if the big companies who are pushing VR could fund a few of the media pioneers, like David, because they will do so much to help us experience the world in a whole new way.