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Google and Yi Technology Unveil New Jump Camera for 3D VR Videos
Chinese company Yi Technology has made a name for itself in the last two years by releasing some surprisingly capable GoPro competitors. Now the Xiaomi-backed Yi is expanding into the world of VR and 360-degree video with two new cameras being announced at the NAB conference in Las Vegas. One is for professionals — it’s called the Yi Halo, and it was made in partnership with Google. The other is a consumer spherical camera called the Yi 360 VR.
The Yi Halo is a $16,999 17-camera monster capable of shooting stereoscopic video in 8K resolution at 30 frames per second, or 5.8K at 60 frames per second. It was built to work with Jump, which is a high-end VR creation platform that Google launched in 2015. The core idea of Jump is to encourage VR filmmaking by removing some of the biggest barriers. Google provides general blueprints for the ringed camera rig as well as server space for stitching all the high-resolution imagery together, and then gets to kick back while hardware companies and filmmakers create content to fill its budding Daydream VR platform.
Yi is just the second company to build a rig for the platform — GoPro released the 16-camera Odyssey last year. (IMAX is also working on a Jump-compatible camera setup, and Facebook has its own $25,000 and up solution in the Surround 360 rig.) The company is using modified versions of its 4K action camera to make up the Halo. And while it tops out at the same 8K resolution as the GoPro Odyssey, the ability to shoot 5.8K at 60 frames per second is unique.
The Yi Halo also has one more camera than the Odyssey, which is placed on top of the rig in order to better capture 360-degree footage directly above the viewer’s head when observed through a VR headset. It also has a smartphone app, a touchscreen control panel, and there are levels on the rig structure so filmmakers can line up the horizon. Yi has a knack for these small, but meaningful, advantages over what GoPro offers. For instance, Yi was the first to make an action camera that shoots 4K footage at 60 frames per second, something professional GoPro users have clamored for since the Hero 4 cameras were released.
The $399 Yi 360 VR is another example of this overarching strategy. It can capture 360-degree video at 30 frames per second in 5.7K resolution, slightly edging out the 5.2K resolution of Fusion, the spherical camera GoPro announced last week. (That’s also higher resolution than other leading consumer 360-degree cameras like the Nikon KeyMission 360 or the Samsung Gear 360.)
But while GoPro was thin on details for the Fusion, Yi showed up at NAB ready with specs for its announcement. The Yi 360 VR uses a pair of overlapping 220-degree lenses, two 12-megapixel Sony IMX377 sensors, and an Ambarella processing chip to stitch the footage together in-camera. It can also live stream 2.5K footage at 30 frames per second over Wi-Fi. Users should expect about an hour of battery life.
Yi might be a fly that GoPro can’t swat, but the Chinese company’s weakness so far has been everything beyond specs. Its action cameras aren’t as user-friendly, even if they’re typically cheaper. And, in the case of Yi’s first attempt at a mirrorless camera, they can sometimes be so frustrating that they don’t seem worth the savings. The Yi 360 VR will be available in limited release in June, so we’ll have to wait until at least then to find out of the trend continues.
Both cameras, meanwhile, will come to the US before making it to Yi’s home base of China. Yi CEO Sean Da tells The Verge that, while he expects Chinese VR viewership to boom in the coming years, this is because the majority of “high performance, high quality video creators are still US or European creators.”
To that end, the Yi Halo will be available starting today as part of a limited access program called Jump Start. As part of the program, Google will take applications from filmmakers to receive access to a Jump camera rig and unlimited use of the its Jump Assembler cloud service. Google plans to give out 100 of the Yi Halo cameras to help boost VR filmmaking, and the application process will be open until May 22nd.