Over the last few months, 360-degree virtual-reality video has become one of the biggest trends in video production. It allows viewers to watch live action in 360 degrees on devices like Sony’s Morpheus, Google’s Cardboard, or the Oculus Rift. Now GoPro has moved increasingly into the VR market, announcing they would be building a quadcopter and multi camera rig, but the action camera giant apparently wasn’t finished, GoPro revealed it has built a completely separate rig with Google. The product is a 360-degree, 16-camera rig specifically made for filming 3D VR content for Google’s Jump VR ecosystem. GoPro’s new camera fits right into that system, and lets anyone easily create their own VR content for everything including: online video production, video marketing or even Google’s new Cardboard.

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How it works:

Jump assembles 360 videos that allow users to experience a single scene in every direction. Perfect stereo ensures that near things look near, far things look far. The 3D alignment approach creates a seamless panorama, so users won’t see borders where cameras are spliced together. Until now, filmmakers wanting to shoot 360 video have had very little options. Most people have had to make their own rigs out of between six and 10 GoPro cameras. And that’s before trying to take the resulting footage and turning it into something that’s worth watching. With Jump, once footage is captured, it can be processed with Jump’s software. Resulting is completely immersive footage that can be viewed with a virtual reality headset or with special viewers.

GoPro’s 360 camera arrangement uses HERO4 camera modules allowing all 16 cameras to act as one. Making camera syncing easy, and includes features like shared settings and frame-level synchronisation. However, the rig will only be available to Google’s YouTube content creators for the first six months but will eventually be available to the public later on.

So before its released to the public, check out an example of what’s to come: