If there was one thing that kept on creeping out throughout the year in dribs and drabs last year it was Virtual Reality tech. The Oculus Rift is about to go up for pre-order on January 6th, Google took Cardboard to the classroom and announced plans with GoPro to make it easy to create VR content. It was a year filled with VR announcements and predictions, and it seems that 2016 is the year that the technology hits the mainstream in earnest. Samsung launched the Gear VR, Nokia came out with the Ozo camera system and yet it’s not all that accessible or easy for the average consumer to create virtual reality or 360-degree content. The VUZE is a small device that aims to fix all of that.
Announced during CES 2016, the VUZE is a colorful and easy-to-use camera that has 8 different cameras inside of it, all poised to create 360-degree content as well as virtual reality content. It’s designed to be as simple as possible, even the tripod accessory looks simple. Designed and developed by HumanEyes Technologies, an industry-leader in photographic and animation technologies, the VUZE is designed to be as easy as pie, and is described as a “point-and-click” experience. The 8 different cameras all work together to create something that ends up being 4K in resolution and the proprietary Adaptive Blending technique causes the VUZE to stitch content together as the human eye would see it.
Creating content with a camera and putting into a final product is of course just one part of the equation and stitching VR content has always been difficult. VUZE have created an app for both Android and iOS that makes it simple to preview the end product, but it also offers a dedicated software suite, too. The VUZE Studio is available for both Windows and Mac OS X and can automatically stitch content together in full 4K resolution at a 1:1 speed (depending on your computer, naturally). All of this sounds great, but there’s always a catch with emerging tech, and with VR it seems price is always that catch. The Oculus Rift is expect to be expensive when it finally goes on sale this week, but the VUZE will launch in August of this year for less than $1,000 making it one of the cheapest out there. There’s lots of information at VUZE’s site linked below, and we’ll leave you with the refreshing note that content from the VUZE can be replayed absolutely anywhere VR video is supported.
