Oculus 360 Videos

Oculus 360 Videos
Information
Type	360-degree video player
Industry	Virtual reality
Developer	Oculus VR
Operating System	Oculus mobile (Gear VR)
Supported Devices	Samsung Gear VR
Release Date	December 2014

Oculus 360 Videos was a virtual reality media application developed by Oculus VR for the Samsung Gear VR. It played back panoramic 360-degree video, placing the viewer inside a sphere of footage so that turning the head revealed different parts of the recorded scene. The app was one of four sample experiences Oculus built for the launch of the Samsung Gear VR Innovator Edition, alongside Oculus Home, Oculus Cinema, and Oculus 360 Photos.

The Innovator Edition headset was announced on September 3, 2014, and went on sale in the United States on December 8, 2014, for 199 US dollars, working only with the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 smartphone. The 360-video viewing function was later carried by the broader Oculus Video app on Gear VR; Oculus and Samsung wound down the Gear VR software platform in 2020, ending updates and content downloads.

Background

The Gear VR was a head-mounted holder that turned a Samsung Galaxy phone into a mobile VR headset, with the phone supplying the display, processor, and battery. The first model, the Innovator Edition for the Galaxy Note 4, used the phone's Quad HD 5.7-inch AMOLED screen and was sold as an early-access beta product aimed at developers and enthusiasts rather than the general consumer market. Oculus VR, which Facebook had agreed to acquire earlier in 2014, supplied the headset's software, including the Oculus Home launcher used to browse and start applications from the Oculus Store.

Oculus built four first-party experiences for the platform's debut. Oculus Cinema was a virtual movie theater for 2D and 3D films; Oculus 360 Photos showed panoramic still images; and Oculus 360 Videos played panoramic moving footage. At launch, sample 360 content included a specially filmed segment of the Cirque du Soleil show Zarkana.

Function

Oculus 360 Videos presented each clip as an equirectangular panorama wrapped onto the inside of a sphere, with the viewer positioned at the center. Looking around with the head changed the visible portion of the footage, but because mobile Gear VR tracked rotation only (three Degrees of freedom), the viewpoint could not move through the scene.

The app was operated through the Gear VR headset's side touchpad. According to Oculus and Samsung support material, the user opened Oculus Home, selected the library, chose the installed Oculus 360 Videos app, pressed Start, and then picked a clip. Touchpad controls included a view-list icon to open the catalog of available videos and a restart icon to replay the current clip from the beginning.

Video format and technical specifications

A 360 video is a recording that captures every direction around the camera, then stores it as a flat equirectangular image (similar to a world map projection) that the player wraps around the inside of a sphere. Oculus supported both monoscopic 360 video, where both eyes see the same image and there is no depth between foreground and background, and stereoscopic 360 video, where separate left- and right-eye images are stacked in the file (for example top-and-bottom) to add depth. Oculus VR chief technology officer John Carmack noted that monoscopic clips could carry roughly twice the per-eye resolution of stereoscopic clips at the same file size, so viewers sensitive to sharpness often preferred monoscopic footage.

Oculus published encoding guidance for content aimed at Gear VR. The suggested settings differed for monoscopic and stereoscopic delivery.

Setting	Monoscopic	Stereoscopic
Resolution	4096 x 2048	3840 x 2160
Frame rate	30 fps	30 fps
Codec	H.264	H.265 / VP9
Bitrate	(project dependent)	10-20 Mbps

Source: Oculus "Introduction to 360 Video for Gear VR" developer documentation.

The documentation listed H.264, H.265, VP8, and VP9 as codec options with hardware-decoding support on Gear VR hardware, with the choice depending on platform compatibility, licensing, and whether hardware or software decoding was used. It also explained that perceived sharpness in a headset is much lower than the raw file resolution suggests, because the panorama is spread across a full sphere: a 4K source viewed through a roughly 90-degree field of view yields a perceived resolution of only about 1K, and reaching a 4K perceived image in that field of view would require source footage near 16K. For streamed delivery, Oculus recommended adaptive streaming over HLS or DASH and the use of the ExoPlayer media library on Android.

VR and AR relevance

Oculus 360 Videos was an early consumer route for watching 360-degree video in a head-mounted display, arriving with the first Gear VR in late 2014. It helped establish 360 video as a distinct VR content category separate from interactive, fully synthetic VR experiences: the viewer sits at a fixed point inside pre-recorded footage and can only look around, rather than walk through or interact with a rendered world. This made the app, and the format generally, a low-friction entry point for filmed content on mobile VR, since 360 video required far less computing power to play back than real-time 3D rendering.

Beyond the first-party app, Gear VR's 360-video ecosystem included curated services such as Samsung's Milk VR (later Samsung VR), which delivered free 360-degree video to the Innovator Edition.

Discontinuation

On March 31, 2020, Facebook (then the owner of Oculus) announced the end of new Oculus operating-system software updates for Gear VR. From that date the Oculus Video and Oculus 360 Photos apps could no longer be downloaded to Gear VR, and rented or purchased films were no longer available, with affected buyers offered Oculus Store credit. Developers were barred from supporting Gear VR in new apps submitted to the Oculus Store after September 15, 2020. Users who already had the apps installed could continue using them.

Samsung separately shut down its companion video service. On May 15, 2020, the company said it would end Samsung XR (formerly Samsung VR, originally Milk VR): the app was removed from Oculus Go, Oculus Rift, and Oculus Quest on the Oculus Store on June 30, 2020, and the service closed entirely on September 30, 2020, with user accounts deleted, citing that the Gear VR was no longer available. These changes left the Gear VR 360-video apps effectively unmaintained and unobtainable for new users by late 2020.