Some of the earliest 360 VR cameras used GoPro cameras. Over the years there has been the GoPro Jump 16 camera setup (which inspired my own 10 camera version), the GoPro Omni 6 camera rig (which I shot for several years), and a dual camera GoPro housing that I used on a few mountain bike adventures. The later is the inspiration for this project. The goal is to have a lightweight camera for action and VLOG that can produce reasonable quality 3D “spatial videos”.
Camera Build
Most of the previous projects used Hero3 or Hero4s, but I wanted an improvement in quality so I went with the Hero 6. It is a 4K camera with H265 codec support, and good image stabilization, a nice improvement over the previous generation cameras. The field of view is 150 degrees, which is narrower than a 180VR camera, but wider than early spatial photos/videos that use the Apple Vision Pro Camera (100 degrees) or iPhone 15 (84 degrees).
I 3D printed a rig to hold the cameras at 69MM IPD. This is about as close as you can get the lenses without butting them right up to each other, but should be good for everything except very close up shots. Controlling the two cameras is done with the GoPro wireless remote.
Test Footage
I processed the footage in Blackmagic Fusion using KartaVR, and output a stereo side by side video which was converted to MV-HEVC using the Kartaverse Spatial Metadata Tool on my Apple M2 Pro Mini. This is the video on the right. I also tried to convert the side by side for viewing on Youtube, this requires a metadata injection using ffmpeg, but the aspect ratio is still incorrect. I’ll put some updated steps in the video description once I figure out why Youtube is messing this up.
