STACK #140 Jun 2016

TECH FEATURE

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view to a thrill The fear of missing out is now a thing of the past with the 360fly. By John Roebuck I t’s an astonishing world that we live in, where technology can converge with science fiction. In 1968, Stanley Kubrick foreshadowed the invention of the iPad in his film 2001: A Space Odyssey . In 1989, in Back to the Future Part II , Marty McFly’s shoelaces tied air, able to capture everything happening around you, or everything in its field of view. It’s even waterproof, provided you use the included plug to seal the microphone input. If you’re already an action camera enthusiast then the 360fly is definitely your new favourite toy. Once the footage is captured, it’s transmitted back to an app on your phone, available for Android and iOS system, where you can either watch it like a regular video or, astonishingly, move your phone around to see different parts of the 360° capture. Put the app in Virtual Reality mode, strap on a VR headset, and move your head to look around the new virtual reality world that you’ve just created. This is immersive stuff. Sharing online has become an integral part of the contemporary

tech climate and the 360fly makes it remarkably easy to communicate your footage with others. Using the app, you can edit your clips and share them on Facebook, Twitter and Break. com with absolute ease. There’s even a way of embedding the clips and including them in your blog, allowing viewers to peruse the scene in a full 360 degrees. With commercialised VR happening at a tremendous rate, the 360fly is an essential tool for anyone wanting to experiment in the medium and the first step in a new and astounding direction.

themselves. Two years ago, Nike released those very shoes. And now, the virtual reality recordings that Ralph Fiennes’ Lenny Nero traded in Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days have become a reality. We can experience incidents as they have happened to other people, in virtual reality. The 360fly is an action camera, like the GoPro or the Panasonic, barrel-shaped action cameras. But it doesn’t look like one. That’s because it’s a different type of action camera to everything else on the market at the moment. Capturing 360-degree footage has customarily required a host of cameras, rigged up to capture video in unison. It’s not hyperbole so suggest that the 360fly is the first step in a new era of action videography. Imagine creating your own virtual reality out of reality. The entire device is smaller than a tennis ball and comes with a variety of mounts that allow the user to attach the camera practically anywhere. The lens of the camera is spherical, pointing directly up into the

TECH

JUNE 2016

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