Render Results from DJI s800 evo Drone Flight & 3D 360 VR video

shadow3

 
This blog post is a bit of brain dump, so bare with me on spelling, grammar, and organization.

Interesting week.  On thursday, we finally accomplished our first test flight the the DJI s 800 evo Drone & the 3D 360 VR video rig by 360heros & Gopro.  Much of the hold up was a combination of firmware updates complications, drone flight control checks, cooperating weather (winds) & our schedules.

Today I’ve completed the first output of video, both left eye & right, followed by merging for side by side 3D.  We have success, but the outcomes was not exactly as thrilling as expected, do to a couple of reasons.

1) Being spherical video, it is impossible to capture the media at the Nodal point.  Stitching errors are bound. Kolor’s AVP & APG software tools are powerful in blinding, but non-the-less, stitch errors are evident with objects within the 4ft range.  This  no nodal point is further exasperated by stereoscopic 3d rig from 360 heros, and the drone itself is obviously very close cam rig.  Things like the landing gear, body, and propeller arms are terribly stitched.  Viewing through the oculus rift causes visuals issues similar to looking at something distant with an object close to your eyes.  That close object will appear to have ghost image do to the parallax of your eyes.

2) The test flight was in a big open field.  During take off and landing, and even the near by trees and ourselves had 3D depth. But not much.  The Caution Tape music show had plenty of objects between 8 & 20ft, providing quite an enjoyable 3D depth experience.  Perhaps if the flight was done in an environment with many objects, large trees, near by buildings, etc. then the 3D experience would be more enjoyable.

Other thoughts, Next flight VR video recording, it would be greatly improve the stitching time if the drone itself had color markings & the launch pad had color pattern.  3hrs was spent simply finding control point of overlapping images.   Also, we had the 360heros rig has two mounting threads.  One holds the cameras vertically & horizontally, the other holds the rig at a 45degree angle.  From the experience of Caution Tape’s shoot, we had the rig mounted vertically.  This resulted in a disappointedly large coverage of the tripod at the Nadir.   This time, we flew the rig at a 45degree angle, however, I should have done it vertically.  We wanted to capture the drone, for cool drone sake; I suspect that it would have helped with the stitching.  Good to know for next flight.

As far as viewing, initially we were concerned about fast movement causing jarring motion sickness issues.  However, after viewing the VR vid, the take off was exciting, but the remaining footage was slow and unexciting.   Depending on what kind of experience we would like to make, fast movement is exciting, while slow movements will be good for relaxing meditative experiences.

Bottom line, success with a lot of lessons learned.

Cheers!