Vuze Is A “Point-and-Shoot” VR Camera Coming This Fall
VR cameras lie in the extremes of the market price range: they either cost just a couple hundred dollars with the basic features, such as the Ricoh Theta, or they go upwards the tens-of-thousands-of-dollars range but packing high-end capabilities, like the Nokia OZO or the GoPro VR contraption. However, a company called HumanEyes is set to establish a boundary between those extremes with a reasonably-priced prosumer VR camera. It’s called Vuze.
With a slightly larger footprint than the Ricoh Theta or the Samsung Gear 360, the Vuze is still portable enough to be carried around or to put in your jeans’ pocket. It has a square-ish form factor, having a total of eight full HD cameras – two on each side, each with 120-degree horizontal and 180-degree vertical fields of view (FOV). That setup allows it to capture stereoscopic 360 videos in 4K resolution at 30 frames per second (fps). Vuze has a mobile app for both Android and iOS that lets the user control functions on the camera.
HumanEyes promotes the Vuze with its “point-and-shoot” capabilities, from video capture to footage processing. The company says it will have “near real-time processing” through its Vuze Studio app, that stitches the footage together using a variety of techniques, including a proprietary algorithm called adaptive blending.
Reasonably priced at just under $800, Vuze charts a different territory compared with other VR camera setups, including the high-grade professional cameras like Nokia Ozo or GoPro’s makeshift VR camera rigs. It directly competes with the Gear 360 and the Ricoh Theta both in price and features — however, neither of these cameras are able to do stereoscopic VR capture like the Vuze does. Looking at the time gap to launch Vuze, these cameras still have time to bump up their capabilities to go side-by-side in competition with the Vuze.
Originally shown at CES, the full kit is now available for preorder for $799, with an estimated ship date of sometime in October.
For more information on Vuze, please visit the following websites:
http://vuze.camera
https://www.facebook.com/vuze.camera/
http://www.humaneyes.com
