CES 2015

One of the best demos I took in at CES was provided by French tech company Giroptic, a participant in the cutting-edge Tech West expo at the Sands. Part of it had to do with the quality of the seamless 360-degree HD video captured by the company’s Go Pro-style compact camera. But a bigger part had to do with the fact that the footage was being displayed on the Oculus Rift—my first experience with that storied, soon-to-come VR headset.

The 360° Cam’s three 8 MP sensors capture, well, everything, and it employs on-the-fly image stitching to piece things together into a coherent 360-degree whole. Not content to merely capture surround video, it has three microphones to capture surround sound audio. There’s also a built-in gyroscope for optical image stabilization. The thing is even waterproof, letting you capture 360-degree footage while skin-diving or surfing.

Gyroptic’s Viewer app provides a panoramic-plus view of the 360° Cam’s output on a smartphone or tablet, and your footage can be streamed over the Internet. (Giroptic’s CEO told me that YouTube has plans to support 360-degree video content starting in Q1 20015.) The 360° Cam will ship sometime in 2015, and it can be pre-ordered now for $499.