How It Works: 360-Degree Internet Video

360-degree Internet video: full-motion video in which you can pan left, right, up, and down for different views.

You haven't done this before: You're watching a movie, and you want to see what's happening behind the camera, outside the view of the lens. So you turn around and look for yourself. A new technology called 360-degree Internet video lets you change what you're looking at and decide what you want to see.

• 360-degree Internet video lets you change the camera's point of view within a film or broadcast.
  
  
• It requires a proprietary lens and software to capture the image.
  
  
• You can watch most types with RealPlayer or Windows Media Player, although the video can be choppy at low connection speeds.
  
  

360-degree video captures all the action going on around the camera. Whereas a typical lens captures what your eyes see while staring straight ahead, these new systems can get the full picture, so the result is like having eyes in the back of your head.

The technology is similar to a digital panorama that lets you zoom around within a static image. With a panorama, you take several digital images, each slightly overlapping, and then use software to "stitch" them together into a long, unbroken image. Using plug-ins for your Web browser, you can pan to the right, the left, or completely around in a circle, getting a feel for the entire scene.

But 360-degree video takes digital panorama to the next level by letting you pan around within moving video. For example, instead of panning across the great expanse of the Grand Canyon in a panorama, you can watch a video of a hike down the Bright Angel trail, looking up, down, left, and right at will as the camera descends.

All in the Lens

Special lens configurations enable video to be shot in 360 degrees. Each of the current systems--from Be Here, IMove, and IPix--records in a slightly different way.

Be Here's Internet video system uses a conical lens. It records a 360-degree horizontal image and captures everything 45 degrees up and down from the horizon to create a 90-degree vertical image. The IMove system uses a digital video camera that records with six lenses. Each lens picks up 95 degrees of the total circle. (The overlap is used to help stitch the images together later.) It picks up 360 degrees horizontally as well as vertically, creating a sphere that you can look around in. IPix records using two back-to-back fish-eye lenses and films 360 degrees horizontally and vertically.

Once the images are shot, software assembles and readies them for viewing over the Internet. Be Here's lens creates doughnut-shaped images that need to be flattened before you can view them. IMove's software glues together the images from the six lenses to create each frame, while IPix's software molds the two 180-degree images together. Each application also corrects for distortions so that the end result looks natural.

The videos generated can be streamed or posted on a Web site for download. While people watch, they move the mouse left, right, up, or down within the viewer to look in any direction.