Surround 360

Surround 360
Basic Info
VR/AR	Virtual Reality
Type	Camera
Subtype	Virtual Reality Camera
Platform	Linux-powered PC
Developer	Facebook
Announcement Date	12 April 2016 (F8 2016)
Release Date	26 July 2016 (designs and software published on GitHub)
Price	Designs and software free; parts about US$30,000 (2016 estimate)
Website	https://github.com/facebook/Surround360
Versions	Surround 360 (renamed Surround 360 Open Edition in 2017); Surround 360 x24 and x6 (2017 designs)
Requires	Camera Control Software, Stitch and Render Software
System
Operating System	Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (capture computer)
Storage
Storage	8 x 1 TB SSD RAID (about 1 hour of continuous raw capture)
Display
Resolution	4K, 6K, and 8K per eye; 8192 x 4096 per eye equirectangular at 8K
Image
Field of View	360 x 180 degrees
Optics
Optics	14 Sunex DSL318 wide-angle lenses (f/2.4); 3 Fujinon FE185C086HA-1 fisheye lenses
Audio
Camera	17 Point Grey Grasshopper3 GS3-U3-41C6C-C cameras (CMOSIS CMV4000 1-inch global-shutter sensors)
Connectivity
Connectivity	USB 3.0 cameras, fiber optic breakout box to capture computer
Power	350 W max
Device
Dimensions	460 x 460 x 307.65 mm (camera only)
Weight	16 kg (camera only)
Material	Milled aluminum alloy and steel
Color	Black
Input	Web-based capture interface

Surround 360 is a stereoscopic 360-degree video capture system developed by Facebook (now Meta Platforms), made up of a 17-camera rig, camera control software and automated stitching and rendering software. Facebook announced it at its F8 developer conference in San Francisco on 12 April 2016 and said it would not brand or sell the camera; instead it released the hardware design and the stitching code as open source on GitHub on 26 July 2016. Both the hardware design and the software were made freely available so that developers and creators could build, modify and use the system to produce their own content.

Producing a stereoscopic 360-degree panoramic video without manual intervention is difficult. Facebook's software uses optical flow between neighboring cameras to compute the left-right eye stereo disparity and synthesize a separate view for each eye. Facebook said the automated pipeline took stitching time "from weeks to overnight". The system outputs 4K, 6K or 8K video per eye, and the 6K and 8K outputs use Facebook's Dynamic Streaming codec for playback on the Samsung Gear VR headset. Press reports put the cost of the parts for one rig at about US$30,000.

At F8 2017 Facebook renamed the original design Surround 360 Open Edition and introduced two further designs, the Surround 360 x24 and x6, which capture depth for six degrees of freedom (6DoF) playback and were to be licensed to commercial partners rather than sold by Facebook. The Surround360 GitHub repository was archived by its owner on 31 August 2021 and is now read-only.

Reviewed 21 October 2026. Checked the article claims against the Facebook engineering posts of April and July 2016, the GitHub READMEs, licence and assembly manual, the archived Facebook 360 page, the cited 2016-2018 press reports and the 2019 ACM TOG paper. About review dates.

The Surround 360 VR capture system

The objective

Explaining their motivation for developing Surround 360, the Facebook team wrote that the existing 3D-360 video cameras it had seen were proprietary or available only by special request, that their cameras overheated, that the rigs were not sturdy enough to mount on production gear, and that stitching took a prohibitively long time because it had to be done by hand.

Facebook set out to design a 3D-360 camera system that could capture, edit and render footage reliably. Adweek attributed the announcement blog post to Facebook director of engineering Brian Cabral and quoted it: "We're open-sourcing the camera to accelerate the growth of the 3-D-360 ecosystem".

The three interconnected components of the 3D-360 system

The Surround 360 end-to-end video capture system is made up of three main components, which Facebook described as interdependent: a weakness in one affects the quality of the others. The project's GitHub repository is divided into the same three parts: hardware designs and assembly instructions, a Linux desktop application that controls the cameras and captures raw data, and rendering software that turns the raw data into a format for viewing in VR.

Facebook's own requirements called for off-the-shelf parts, but the rig also needs custom-made pieces: the assembly manual lists machined parts such as the base and top plates, the camera bracket, the 14 shell supports and the top and bottom covers. Newsshooter observed that the design uses off-the-shelf internals but still has "lots of specially fabricated parts" that cannot be bought in an ordinary hardware store.

The three major components

• Hardware (computer and camera)
• Camera control software (to synchronize and capture the camera streams)
• Stitch and render software

Hardware

Before designing the camera, the team set out its requirements:

• All cameras must be globally synchronized, capturing 30 or 60 frames per second "exactly and simultaneously", with every frame captured within less than 1 ms of the others. Unsynchronized frames make stitching much harder.
• Each camera must have a global shutter, so that all pixels are exposed to the scene at the same moment.
• The cameras must not overheat and must run reliably over many hours of on-and-off shooting.
• The rig and cameras must be rigid and rugged, so that the cameras stay aligned.
• The rig should be relatively simple to construct from off-the-shelf parts so that others can replicate, repair and replace it.

Facebook chose industrial cameras made by Point Grey because they have global shutters and do not overheat when run for long periods. The cameras are mounted on an aluminum chassis, which keeps them stable and aligned, and the exterior shell is powder-coated steel that protects the internal components. The 2017 assembly manual specifies a 1/4-inch top plate and a 3/8-inch base plate of Mic-6 aluminum with a black anodized finish, and top and bottom covers of mild steel with a painted finish.

The rig uses 17 cameras. Fourteen wide-angle cameras are arranged in a horizontal ring with overlapping fields of view, one fisheye camera points up and two fisheye cameras point down; the second bottom camera allows the tripod pole to be removed from the image in post-production. The side cameras have roughly 90-degree horizontal and vertical fields of view, which fall to 77 degrees after barrel distortion is corrected; the top and bottom cameras use 180-degree fisheye lenses. Vision Systems Design reported that the cameras are Grasshopper3 GS3-U3-41C6C-C color USB3 Vision models built around a 4.1-megapixel, 1-inch global-shutter CMOS sensor with 5.5 µm pixels, and that Point Grey had developed VR camera bundles based on Facebook's specifications. Road to VR reported 2048 x 2048 capture at up to 60 frames per second.

Facebook's assembly manual gives the following specifications for the camera head:

Item	Specification
Type	Spherical and stereoscopic video capture
Cameras	17 Point Grey GS3-U3-41C6C-C camera bodies
Sensor	CMOSIS CMV4000-3E5, CMOS with global shutter; 17 synchronized 1-inch sensors; 5.5 µm pixels; 10-bit ADC; ISO 600; 9 stops of dynamic range
Lenses	14 Sunex DSL318 wide-angle lenses (f/2.4, 77 degrees diagonal at center); 3 Fujinon FE185C086HA-1 fisheye lenses (185 degrees); C mount
Coverage	Full spherical, 360 x 180 degrees; stereoscopic coverage centerline +/- 144 degrees horizontal, 77 degrees vertical
Output resolution	8192 x 4096 per eye equirectangular, 8192 x 8192 for both eyes
Capture	RAW over USB 3.0; 30 fps (maximum 60 fps); 17 Gb/s at 30 fps
Dimensions	460 x 460 x 307.65 mm (camera only); 460 x 460 x 796.60 mm with mount
Weight	16 kg (camera only)
Construction	Milled aluminum alloy and steel, black
Operating temperature	0 to 50 degrees C
Power consumption	350 watts maximum

The manual recommends keeping objects at least 5 feet from the camera, mounting it between 4 feet 10 inches and 6 feet 2 inches high, and shooting in at least 130 lux to limit noise. It also suggests either hiding the computer, storage and power supply behind large objects in the scene or placing them under the camera and removing them in post-production.

Camera control software

After the hardware, the focus shifts to controlling the cameras and capturing and storing their output. The Facebook team chose a Linux-based PC with enough system bandwidth to take in the streams from all of the cameras and write them to disk.

To make sure frames are not dropped, the system needs a high, steady transfer rate and a fast disk system. At 30 Hz the rig requires a sustained transfer rate on the order of 17 Gb/s, and Facebook used an 8-way level-5 RAID SSD disk system to keep up with the cameras. The manual's reference build pairs a ruggedized "lunchbox" computer (Intel Core i7-5960X, 64 GB of memory, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS) with a fiber optic breakout box holding USB 3.0 expansion cards and an 8-bay RAID tower with eight 1 TB SSDs, which it rates at about one hour of continuous raw capture. In the open-source release, Facebook noted that the rig produces roughly 120 GB of raw data per minute of video at 30 fps, and double that at 60 fps.

Users control the cameras through a simple web interface, so the rig can be operated from any device with an HTML browser. Custom capture software sets each camera's frame rate, analogue sensor gain, shutter speed and exposure, and syncs all of the cameras globally. A real-time capture thread runs alongside lower-priority, buffered threads that write to disk. The system captures raw Bayer data to preserve quality throughout the rendering pipeline. The camera control application requires Ubuntu Linux (tested on 16.04, 64-bit) and Point Grey's FlyCapture SDK.

Stitching software

Facebook described the stitching algorithms as the most difficult part of the system. Its design goal is to keep image quality through every stage of processing, since quality lost at one stage cannot be recovered later. The April 2016 announcement described these main steps:

• The raw Bayer images are converted to gamma-corrected RGB, with color correction, anti-vignetting, tone curves, sharpening and demosaicing.
• Intrinsic image correction removes lens distortion and reprojects each image into a polar coordinate system.
• A bundle-adjusted extrinsic correction compensates for small differences in camera orientation.
• Optical flow is computed between pairs of cameras to work out the left-right eye stereo disparity.
• Novel views are synthesized for virtual cameras for each eye, and the final left and right pixels are composited.

The July 2016 open-source write-up added detail. The renderer models two virtual eyes spaced 6.4 cm apart (an adjustable value) rotating around the center of the head, so that each column of the equirectangular output corresponds to one head orientation. Keypoints matched across neighboring cameras are used to optimize per-camera transforms that minimize vertical parallax. The top camera is warped into the side panorama with optical flow and alpha-blended with deghosting, and a mask of the pole lets the second bottom camera's image replace the tripod pole. The rendering software runs on Linux or Mac OS X and depends on CMake, gflags, glog and OpenCV 3.0 or later.

Playing the 3D-360 video content

The Surround 360 system outputs 4K, 6K or 8K video for each eye. The 6K and 8K outputs use Facebook's Dynamic Streaming codec for the Gear VR headset, and the output files can also be viewed in other virtual reality headsets such as the Oculus Rift.

Stereoscopic 360 videos captured with the system can also be shared on Facebook. Only one of the monoscopic views is shown while scrolling through News Feed, but the full stereo version can be downloaded.

Open-source release

Facebook published the camera design and stitching software on GitHub on 26 July 2016, after saying at F8 that it planned to post them that summer. The release includes blueprints, 3D model files for the base plates and shell (including STEP files for CAD software), an illustrated assembly manual and sample datasets for testing the renderer without a camera. The components use different licenses: the hardware design is under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, and the rendering software under a BSD license; Facebook also provided an additional patent grant.

Cabral, director of engineering on the project, told TechCrunch that Facebook believed it was "the first camera to be fully open sourced end-to-end". According to TechCrunch, an engineer whom Facebook asked to build the rig from the open-source instructions took about four hours. Facebook's official Surround 360 page said the camera was not available for purchase, estimated assembly at around four hours plus a couple of hours to set up the operating system, and pointed to sample footage shot at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco and at Facebook's Aquila hangar in the United Kingdom.

Successors: Surround 360 x24 and x6

Facebook chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer announced two new designs, the x24 and the x6, at F8 2017 in San Jose. Both are part of the Surround 360 family, are named for their number of cameras, and shoot in six degrees of freedom, so that a viewer can move their head within the captured scene instead of only looking around from a fixed point. As with the first rig, Facebook did not plan to sell the cameras itself. It planned to license the designs to a select group of commercial partners to bring them to market later in 2017, and no pricing was announced for either camera.

Facebook said it was partnering with post-production companies and visual effects houses on tools for the footage, including Adobe, OTOY, Foundry, Mettle, DXO, Here Be Dragons, Framestore, Magnopus and The Mill. OTOY said it would bring its cloud rendering and light field streaming service to the cameras, with the volumetric footage usable across its ORBX ecosystem of 28 authoring and editing tools, and stated that the cameras were planned for release in the fourth quarter of 2017.

Surround 360 x24

The x24 has 24 cameras arranged in a sphere; Engadget compared its shape to a large beach ball. It was prototyped in Facebook's Area 404 and combines a FLIR camera system with Facebook's own architecture. Road to VR reported that it captures full RGB and depth at every pixel of each of its 24 cameras, oversampling each point in the full 360-degree scene four times. Specifications were sparse at the announcement; Road to VR estimated the x24's diameter at about 10 inches.

At F8 2017, UploadVR's Joe Durbin viewed x24 footage in an Oculus Rift. He found the image quality high in the standard 360-degree view and was able to move through the scene in the 6DoF mode, but noted a stitching bug that blurred some edges. He also saw an OTOY scene that could be relit in real time with Unity tools.

Surround 360 x6

The x6 has six cameras and is a smaller, lighter and cheaper design than the x24; Engadget described it as shaped more like a tennis ball. Facebook built the x6 prototype in-house. Road to VR reported that it oversamples by three times and estimated it at about half the diameter of the x24.

Later developments and status

The x24 and x6 were followed by a separate volumetric camera developed with RED Digital Cinema. Facebook and RED announced in May 2018 that they were working on a volumetric video camera, and at Oculus Connect 5 in September 2018 they revealed it as Manifold. Road to VR described the project as based on Facebook's Surround360 technology; the published specifications list 16 RED Helium 8K sensors arranged for 360-degree 6DoF capture. No price or launch date was announced.

A 2019 paper by Facebook researchers, including Cabral, and RED's Uday Mathur in ACM Transactions on Graphics (presented at SIGGRAPH Asia 2019) lists Surround 360, alongside Google's Jump system, as an example of a ring-shaped omni-directional stereo (ODS) camera. The authors note that ODS systems do not support true head motion parallax and produce artifacts when the viewer tilts or rolls their head, and that ODS loses stereo coverage near the poles. Their paper describes a 16-camera 6DoF system with depth estimation and real-time rendering, and its calibration and reconstruction software was released as open source. That software is the Facebook360 Depth Estimation Pipeline (facebook360_dep), published on GitHub under a BSD license.

Facebook renamed its parent company Meta on 28 October 2021. The Surround360 repository had been archived two months earlier, on 31 August 2021; it remains publicly readable but no longer receives changes.

Reception

UploadVR, writing after the 2016 announcement, found the footage shown at F8 good but said it did not look significantly better than footage from other high-end 3D-360 cameras, and compared the roughly US$30,000 cost with Nokia's OZO at US$60,000 and GoPro's Odyssey at around US$15,000. Newsshooter wrote that building one would be unlikely without access to a CNC milling machine, a supply of aluminum and around US$30,000.

See also

• Jump
• Odyssey
• OZO
• 360 Camera
• Volumetric video
• F8 2017