Build hardware synchronized 360 VR camera with YI 4K action cameras

http://open.yitechnology.com/vrcamera.html

http://www.yijump.com/

YI 4K Action Camera is your perfect pick for building a VR camera. The camera boasts high resolution image detail powered by amazing video capturing and encoding capabilities, long battery life and camera geometry. This is what makes us stand out and how we are recognized and chosen as a partner by Google for its next version VR Camera, Google Jump - www.yijump.com

There are a number of ways to build a VR camera with YI 4K Action Cameras. The difference being mainly how you control multiple cameras to start and stop recordings. In general, we would like all cameras to start and stop recording synchronously so you can easily record and stitch your virtual reality video.

The easiest solution is to manually control the cameras one-by-one. It is convenient and quick however it doesn’t guarantee synchronized recording.

A better solution therefore is to make good use of Wi-Fi where all cameras are set to work in Wi-Fi mode and are connected to a smartphone hotspot or a Wi-Fi router. Once setup is done, you should be able to control all cameras with smartphone app through Wi-Fi. For details, please check out https://github.com/YITechnology/YIOpenAPI

Please note that this solution also comes with its limitations. For instance, when there are way too many cameras or Wi-Fi interference happens to be serious, controlling the cameras via smartphone app can sometimes fail. Also, synchronized video capturing is not guaranteed since Wi-Fi is not a real-time communication protocol.

You can also control all cameras with a Bluetooth-connected remote control. The limitations however are similar to that with Wi-F solution.

There are also solutions which try to synchronize video files offline after recording is finished. It is normally done by detecting the same audio signal or video motion in the video files and aligning them. Since this kind of the solutions do not control the recording start time, its synchronization error is at least 1 frame.

HARDWARE SYNCHRONIZED RECORDING

In this article, we will introduce a solution to solve synchronization problem using hardware. We do this by connecting all cameras using Multi Endpoint cable where recording start and stop commands are transmitted in real-time among the cameras, in turn, creating a high-resolution and synchronized virtual reality video.