If you follow Al Jazeera’s social media feed, and you spotted this video, I am sure you would agree with us that your day has been made.
If not, here it is. In the video, embedded below, Al Jazeera’s Basma Atassi takes us through the major landmarks in Mecca, the most sacred destination for Muslims. And as you watch the video, you can tilt your smart-phone or use the arrow buttons on the top-left of the video screen to get a 360-degree-view of the location as the person walks ahead.
Words cannot express the experience, so watch.
So how was this done?
There is a detailed explanation in the ‘How we made this’ section of the video’s page. Here is a gist.
The camera used was a Ricoh ThetaM15, which allows you click and record panoramic images and visuals. It records only 5 minutes of footage at a time and has a 4gb internal memory storage capacity. So you have to shoot, transfer the footage to a computer when the memory is full, and then get back to shooting. Here us the Rico Theta’s concept video. Amazon sells it in India for about Rs. 37,000.
So as you walk slowly across, the camera shoots all around – the camera has two lenses on each of the two sides, which capture all around on all sides.
The video is saved in an .mov format.
To see the final 360-degree footage, you have to download Ricoh’s software which will ‘stitch’ the footage together.
The footage however will need some editing for improving its quality and getting the footage to have clean cuts.
You can then edit the video with audio, cut it for the perfect length. Al Jazeera used Adobe Premiere.
Once you are done rendering it, and here is why we love Google, you can put it up on Youtube. Here is their page on 360-degree videos. To put it up, you have to inject a code from Youtube.
We also found a cool 360-degree Youtube channel, watch away.