ARL News

360VR in Bermuda

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Category: ARL News

ARL's Chris Carpenter sets up one of two 360VR cameras used on Emirates Team NZ and Oracle Team USA.

The 360VR tower positioned just ahead of the main communications tower aboard the AC50 - Richard Gladwell www.photosport.co.nz

An image from eight cameras is stitched together to form the on-board viewing experience.

A low resolution screen shot from the Samsung Gear headset on the platform of the AC50.

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On-board the America's Cup

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Category: ARL News

Animation Research Ltd (ARL) is aiming to put you on-board an America's Cup boat. Recently, Radio New Zealand interviewed ARL CEO Ian Taylor, who described some of the challenges the company faced. "In Bermuda we're doing all the stuff that you'd normally expect, the tracking, the computer graphics, the mobile app... but the thing that's got us all excited is the potential for 360 VR. Imagine it, being on the back of one of those things flying at close to 50 knots, with another one chasing you... unbelievable. So we've had to build our own multi-camera rigs to go on the boats, get permission from the America's Cup people to put them on the boats, and there's so much data coming off the boats that we've had to design a whole logistical system as well."

ARL Systems Manager, John Jenkins, adds: "As a race starts a crew member pushes a button to start all the cameras simultaneously , they record for the duration of their battery life. When the race is finished we grab the unit off the boat, download the data from the cards and process it with our own software. We're hoping to have finished 360 video available within a 3 hour timeframe. There are rigs around that you can do this with, but we're hoping to get better quality stitching and a lot more definition in the video. We've built 2 units for the America's Cup... on the lead-up races we'll be testing the units, the America's Cup people will decide which boats they go on ultimately."