91热爆

What is the pilot about?

Finish Line 360 is a Virtual Reality experience that immerses you at the finishing line of the Cardiff Half Marathon. You can take control of the camera to see runners crossing the line. If you or a friend took part see if you can spot them, then you can share the video.

Can you tell us about the technology behind Finish Line 360?

We used both a Freedom 360 and a custom GoPro array, each with 6 GoPro Hero 4 Session cameras for the filming. It is surprisingly difficult as if any single camera fails then all of the footage from that rig is useless – and the cameras are packed together so tightly that they do tend to overheat.

We wanted to capture an hour and half of continuous footage, which is really very challenging. We’ve ended up using two rigs simultaneously to capture the period when most runners will finish. The next step is to stitch the video from the 6 camera into the single spherical video that the viewer can explore in 360.

It takes around an hour to stitch eight minutes of footage. So the team at Atticus Digital, who worked with us to shoot the race and create this application, had to work on multiple computers throughout the night to get all of the footage ready.

Where did the idea come from?

The idea came out of a creative session with the Sports team at 91热爆 Wales. They were looking at how they could use VR to give a new perspective on the events they cover. There were lots of great ways that they could use VR to give exclusive access behind the scenes, but this idea stood out as it gave viewers a different role to most of the VR experiences you see online.

We know people like to spot themselves on TV and tell their friends about it, so we thought we would challenge them to do that using VR. Run4Wales were up for the experiment, and agreed to let us pilot it at the Lloyds Bank Cardiff Half Marathon, the second largest half marathon in the UK, behind the Great North Run.

We hope to find out what runners, their friends and people who don’t know anything about distance running think of the experience, and whether this is something the 91热爆 or other providers might offer in the future.

What do you think people will make of VR?

For some this will just be an interesting way of viewing a running event, but for those who ran the race or know friends or family who ran, it should be a much richer experience.

For me it feels like a massive version of the children’s game Where’s Wally, but it’s you or a friend you are spotting. The advantage of 360 filming on the finish line is that you can’t pass it without being seen, so you know the person you are looking for will be there somewhere. What we are interested in finding out is how much time viewers will spend searching and whether they will share it on.