The Race to Build the Best VR Camera is Escalating

One of the most impressive things Google unveiled at its developers conference last May was an odd, disc-shaped gadget called the Odyssey. The device, which measured about a foot in diameter, held 16 GoPro cameras that pointed every which way, so that it could film in 360 degrees. Buyers would get access to Google’s software for stitching the synced videos from each camera into virtual reality videos, intended to be watched on headsets like Facebook's Oculus Rift or Google Cardboard. Turning the raw footage into actual videos is a heavy-duty computing task, and Google wrote software to do it on its own servers. The sticker price? $15,000.

Companies like Google and Facebook think that virtual reality is going to be a major way that people use computers in the future. For this to happen, there has to be content that people can watch on VR headsets. That means creating elaborate multi-camera devices commonly referred to as camera rigs. Google wasn't thrilled with the homemade devices and software systems that many filmmakers were using. So it set out to make its own. The result was the Odyssey.