17/10/2019
Wow, Check THIS out!
It's every surfer's big dream: Riding a barrel, inside a tunnel of water, isolated from the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this baffling experience is withheld from most of us except the best surfers out there.
Pro Surfer Koa Smith shows you, how it's like to ride possibly one of the longest barrels ever. Chase him in 3rd person view through those barrels like in a computer game!
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How was this actually shot?
It seems like someone is having some serious drone piloting skills. But that should be pretty impossible. Any contact with the barreling wave and the drone including its sensitive electronic parts would make it crash.
If you watch closely, you will discover an unusual belt around Koa's waist. There is a stick attached to it that holds a 360° VR camera with multiple lenses (like my cam in picture 2 but probably a smaller version).
The camera was attached in a way that the two cameras' field of views overlap in the area where the stick is located at. This way, the stick could be edited out in post-processing so the stick is not visible anymore.
It might be hard to understand at first but it's probably easier to understand if you try this little experiment:
Hold your finger vertically in front of your eyes. Your brain will do the "post-processing" for you and you will still be able to see at full sight, even though the finger is in front of you. It's the same principle.
Spherical 360° VR Videos can be converted to 2D so they can be watched like conventional videos.
Because the full sphere is captured, there is a big degree of freedom in post-processing. For example, selecting and changing the field of view or working with distorting creative effects like the Mirror Ball perspective (as seen in picture 3).
In Koa's case, the mode "Super Fish Eye" was chosen to emulate the human field of view.
This is a beautiful example demonstrating what is possible to pull out of raw 360° VR footage.