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Category: VRcine

14 September 2025

DJI Osmo 360 | touring Washington DC

Written by Paul Moon

Full confession: this “blog” (is that a word anymore?) has been practically abandoned for a really long time, after years of forging new ground in this sector of independent filmmaker technology when there were less — and usually much more credible — sources of information. Now, it’s a traffic jam of clickbait and corporate influence from amateurs and lonely dudes.

But every once in a while, something comes into my kit that inspires me (oddly, it’s been a while). When DJI entered the virtual reality space recently by announcing its Osmo 360 8k camera, it surprised no one: the market had petered down to mostly just Insta360 (yet, remember those Kandao and Samsung flying saucers, or GoPro’s Omni cube of stacked Hero4 cameras?), and I previously wrote here about my adventures with the Insta360 EVO, which cleverly combined VR360 and VR180 tech into one tiny versatile product. After the CES/profit-driven hysteria of virtual reality half a decade ago — selling the fiction that we’d soon consume all media with headsets strapped on — the industry waned, and its best candidate for engagement, VR180 with its three-dimensional immersion capability (and acceptance that nobody really cares about looking backwards anyway), all but died.

To an extent, so did the “action cam” industry, even if GoPro keeps chugging, and DJI has staked its spot with Osmo. Hungry corporate executives figured it out: the best way to salvage VR marketing for this gap period is to sell VR as drone-adjacent, ever more capable action cams. Here comes DJI.

I doubt that they expect any more than 1% of Osmo 360 buyers will actually wear headsets to watch what they make! That’s an amazing development to consider.

What excited me about diving back into this tech, was the ability to “fly” like a drone into settings without the fuss and stress (and increasing illegality) of UAV. What’s more, one of the places where I live, Washington, D.C., simply bans drones anywhere within a 15-mile radius of the White House. This regulation has always egged me on, as a Washingtonian: and given the militarization of the District these days by you-know-who, it’s evermore a dramatic restriction.

No matter the blemishes on my city’s reputation, Washington, D.C. is a beautiful place. Fun fact: it was designed by the landscape architect/city planner of Paris, Pierre L’Enfant, dating back to the early days of this country and its bromance with France. Nothing compares to the city’s open spaces, height limitations (12 stories maximum, no exceptions besides the Washington Monument!), and classical architecture.

I love the clever tech of 360 cameras, in that any stick holding it up becomes invisible due to overlapping fields-of-view from two opposite-facing ultra-wide angle lenses. Forgiving the shadow of the stick that’s cast by the sun, it’s truly a magic trick. I also love how the complete sphere of vision enables jaw-droppingly good image stabilization, paired with gyroscopic metadata that always knows where the relative flat earth is. It therefore becomes irresistible to mount a 360 camera onto the back of a bicycle, suspended almost uncomfortably high into the air, enough to look like a personal drone valet is dedicated to my ride without any need for interaction or guidance. It just works.

Problem is, the supporting gear isn’t ubiquitous, and even the VR camera manufacturers are slack in marketing what’s needed. So I turned to a cheapo import option, actually better than anything offered by DJI or Insta360: for stability (and peace-of-mind/security), the goal is to mount a rigid stick to the back of your bicycle with not just one, but two hefty clamps (one to the seat pole, another to the seat itself). For about fifty bucks, Amazon delivered it the next day, private-labeled by a gibberish company called “KOQEIEY.” Instead of needing to use/repurpose a “selfie stick” (I didn’t own one, and never would be caught dead walking around with one, and remember the apocalyptic period when tourists actually dared to try!), “KOQEIEY” includes a durable telescoping pole in the kit — while DJI and Insta360 do not, despite charging twice as much.

With this rig seen here, I was up and running/riding. (The bike is my trusty GenZe, dating way back to when Mahindra got into the e-bike biz, and I loathe the day when I’ll need to replace it.) But I had another idea: wouldn’t it be cool to also see my actual location on a map, alongside the camera footage? As it turns out, DJI skimped on integrating any ability to collect GPS data during recording. They should have; by now, GPS tracking is cheap and universal tech. Briefly, Sony was including GPS metadata collection into its point-and-shoot cameras; then, too many camera snobs bitched about how GPS is useless for “pros” (barf) who want maximum battery life (even though you could always turn it off).  This is the same boomer mentality you hear about cars “from the good old days that had less bells and whistles to break down.” And thus, poof, GPS in cameras never came back. Manufacturers LOVE not having to spend an extra dime or two on silicon guts if they can get away with it.

But it is possible to tether-feed continuous GPS data via Bluetooth into the Osmo 360 via an accessory, and while DJI makes their official doodad costing one Benjamin, cheap imports on Amazon strike again: I got what I needed from another no-name private label that looks like a randomly generated password (this time, “GAEKOL”) for under fifty bucks. At first, it didn’t go well: acquiring active GPS geolocation takes longer than your typical phone, about a minute or more.  And if it’s not collecting when you start recording, you’re probably out of luck. Also, extracting that GPS metadata into something useful is amazingly primitive in 2025. Worst of all, DJI’s own apps fail to reliably recognize location data using the “Dashboard” feature on their mobile Mimo or desktop Studio — even so, their rendering of maps and other GPS metadata is rudimentary and “action bro”-simplified. DJI hasn’t even bothered to enable Windows editing for Adobe Premiere, currently just feeding Macheads. The biggest target market for these features is an InfoWars species you could call “shredders,” after all.

Enter, then, the heroic open-source donationware community. After reeling from the sticker shock of a bloated option called Telemetry Extractor from a Spanish entrepreneur, I found a simple app from donationware author Dean Zwikel and tried out his converter from .osv files (the video files created by the Osmo 360 with embedded GPS metadata) into .gpx files that can be imported into platforms like Google Earth. At first, it mostly didn’t work: his initial beta version had just launched August 15, and some files worked, others didn’t, with errors or with no GPS metadata detected. I helped Dean by feeding him examples of every outcome both positive and negative, and from that control set, he cleverly engineered a perfectly functioning version 2 that totally delivers. Please support his work at this link and look for OSV2GPX with its pertaining Google Drive directory and instructions.

Now, I was ready:  on a bright and sunny day in downtown Washington, D.C., I rode around for a couple of hours, practically forgetting about the rig, just hitting some highlights in my beloved city.  I started after finishing a meeting on 14th Street in the Logan Circle neighborhood and headed south.  I stopped at my optometrist for a checkup, then hit Pennsylvania Avenue and its majestic boulevard approach to the Capitol building in a smartly-planned center bicycle lane.  I swung around back to the Mall and stopped in at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History to grab a shot for a documentary I’m making, then drove around the Washington Monument past the Tidal Basin and World War II Memorial, onward to the Ellipse and then the front, and back, of the White House, onward to Freedom Plaza (and its embedded map of downtown DC beautifully visible from the air), ending at the World War I Memorial recently added to Pershing Park.  The tech was remarkably maintenance-free, and basically automated.

So also, in fact, was the process of turning that collected GPS metadata into an animated overhead map of the journey using Google Earth Pro.  It used to be a paid service until recently, and Google simply lets you download and use it for free.  They’re trying to migrate (like everything else) into a cloud-only service, but at this time, Google Earth Studio (Web-only) lacks many features of the desktop app.  For example, it can’t import a .gpx file and create a film of that journey in real time to match the pertaining GPS time-and-speed metadata.

That said, Google Earth Pro is a dinosaur of coding, hardly updated in years, and typical of Alphabet’s lackadaisical Bay Area attitude.  It crashes constantly, runs slowly even on a beefed up workstation, and renders out glitches randomly.  You’ll see in my headlining video here that the location pointer jitters almost constantly, and randomly changes size a few times.  But beggars can’t be choosers, and all of Alphabet’s evils help pay for this otherwise amazing technology.  I still can’t get over how the photorealistic buildings from overhead move in true three-dimensional space, shadows, perspective and all.  After I figured out how to wrangle the primitive interface and customize the look for minimalist output, the “Movie Maker” feature delivered great 4K video automatically.

I lined it up in DCI-4k aspect alongside the Osmo 360 panoramic video set to “Asteroid” rendering mode.  Naturally, I maxed out the video settings, and why not?  My 512gb microSD had plenty of room, and the Osmo 360’s clever sensor design efficiency avoided overheating even in exposed warm temperature for long half-hour stretches.  Specifically, I shot in D-Log M and converted using DJI’s new LUT, in 10-bit color, at 8K resolution in 30 frames per second, with the bitrate set to “Maximum.”  I rendered out from DJI Studio to a square 2160p video file, cropping out the edges because it was Asteroid format anyway.  Similarly, the Google Earth Pro output is cropped at the edges, with little compromise because the center tells you where I am.

The resulting film, lasting three-quarters of an hour, isn’t exactly entertainment, but I find it super entertaining to watch.  We simply never see cities this way, yet we think about these things all the time.  Nobody is immune from those childhood awakenings to maps and atlases, that sense of wonder combined with logical sorting of useful information, as old as the ancient or even Polynesian cartographers.  I couldn’t resist sharing.  It’s been a while.

September 14, 2025 FocusPulling Original, FocusPulling Original Video, VRcine Leave a Comment
13 April 2019

Insta360 EVO: 3D VR180 camera custom-rigged onto a 3-axis gimbal stabilizer

Written by Paul Moon

During peak bloom of the famous cherry blossom trees at the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C. on April 3, 2019, I ran my first tests of the new Insta360 EVO in VR180 3D mode, custom-mounted onto a Feiyu WG2 3-axis gimbal stabilizer that was originally designed for GoPro-like action cameras. After rigging the gimbal with an extender for the camera’s 1/4″-20 bottom hole offset, and special clip-on counterweights, I could then mount it onto any boompole/selfie stick and fly around the rig as you see here.

I had originally gotten an adapter custom-manufactured for the WG2 from a French 3D printer, to mount my Sony RX0 instead of a typical action camera, but the same kind of adapter is by now readily and cheaply available in an even better form factor for this purpose.

Sometimes in the grove of cherry blossom trees, I experimented with angling the view up into the air, that’s conventionally a no-no risking nausea and disorientation, but it’s interesting to try in this context where all the good stuff is higher than eye-level.

This resolution is 5.7k, and of course it is best to watch using a headset/VR goggles, ranging from Google Cardboard-style, to an Oculus Go using the YouTube VR app.

On the Insta360 EVO, I shot in non-HDR video mode for preserving the finest detail, while using the LOG color space for dynamic range that is converted here back to REC.709 using the official LUT. Flowstate electronic stabilization is activated for further smoothing of motion at minimal quality loss, given the latitude provided by the 180-degree field-of-view.

Thankfully, by now Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2019 includes support for editing VR180 content, but it was quite difficult to grind through this source footage using Insta360’s “no-stitch” Premiere plug-in, which frequently resulted in a blank Program Monitor even on a heavy-lifting PC, while grinding to a halt.  So, I ended up resorting to the old workflow, of using Insta360 Studio 2019 to stitch the footage into the proper H.264 format, importing into Premiere like anything else, and applying the official LUT with my editing cuts.  I had to jack up the color saturation a little, crush the shadows down, and protect the highlights some more:  Insta360’s implementation of LOG here is just as mediocre as the nearly-identical Insta360 One X that I was previously using, and probably isn’t a faithful deployment of the usual complex calculations for LOG color space — it merely seems to lift shadows and reduce highlights on a straight line (e.g., contrast reduction).  They need to work on this.

But besides a laughably overpriced product from Z CAM and its even more expensive successor announced at NAB 2019, unfortunately the EVO is the only game in town for 3D VR180 capture:  the Vuze XR, QooCam and Lenovo Mirage offer worse specs and performance, while the long-promised Yi Horizon has turned out to be vaporware.  And as widely discussed, 3D VR180 is the better compromise during this sluggish time of VR tech:  3D VR360 is a non-starter in almost every use case, because the resolution gets essentially halved, and headsets can’t handle the best of it.  And, do people really turn their heads all the way around anyway?  Hardly ever.  The Insta360 EVO is famously convertible, between 3D VR180 and 2D VR360 modes, but I think I’ll be sticking with the former in most cases for the foreseeable future.

PRODUCTS USED:
Insta360 EVO: https://focuspull.in/evo
Feiyu WG2: https://amzn.to/2DcDaQm
Adapter for WG2: https://amzn.to/2UEFxWV
Extender: https://amzn.to/2X72639
Counterweights: https://amzn.to/2X98nvi

 

April 13, 2019 FocusPulling Original, FocusPulling Original Video, VRcine 2 Comments
05 June 2018

Pre-review of RED Hydrogen & conversation with Jim Jannard

Written by Paul Moon

UPDATE AUGUST 2, 2018: An early-draft OWNER’S MANUAL is now posted publicly at this certification link. However, it nearly amounts to a placemarker for any Android phone, written to meet the minimum requirements for certification.

The RED Hydrogen One is a $1.2k Android phone that displays a bit of three-dimensional depth in its medium-brightness display, without any need for 3D glasses.  If you read no further, this basically sums up what the Hydrogen will bring to a complicated, carrier-driven marketplace of smartphones this year.

I was an early adopter of the LG Optimus 3D smartphone way back in 2011, and we’ve since seen the Nintendo 3DS gaming systems too; so in my mind, this is really round three of portable 3D tech.  If there’s a theme worth promoting here, it’s all about managing expectations:  honestly, the best you can do for comparison, is to dig into your childhood memories and remember those 3D books showing just a hint of depth whenever you’d shift the angle a little, as seen in this two-frame animated GIF that I shot while visiting my folks in California, pulled from what’s left of my childhood library!

Early reviews of the Hydrogen have been trickling into public view, after a couple of limited hands-on demos, but on June 3, while attending AT&T Shape 2018 as a filmmaker at Warner Bros Studios, I got a hands-on test upon entering RED’s mobile tent, seen here.  That was cool; but what happened just after leaving the tent, was totally rad.  (Visiting southern California brings back my upbringing’s 20th century surf dude vernacular.)  Sitting at an adjacent picnic table on the Warner Bros. lot was Jim Jannard, founder of RED (and Oakley, which he sported in matching eyewear and apparel).  He told me that he’s camera-shy, so I’m not posting his picture here, but we started off with something in common:  I grew up in Irvine, California, attending high school and college there, which is also Jim’s base of operations.

I’ve always been reticent about the RED ecosystem, famously stocked with near-fanatical user discipleship, evidenced at the RED forums where Jim has gained a reputation for straight-shooting in short messages that frequently ruffle feathers (but mostly receive instantaneous hordes of fan support).  So what surprised me from the start, was his gentle and friendly way of expressing his enthusiasm, and openness to conversation with little me.  He’s a really nice guy, the opposite of an East Coast entrepreneur, while he has managed to build an aggressive empire far outside the legacy system of Far East manufacturers and vendors (which reminds me a lot of his wild west counterpart down under, Blackmagic Design).  Basically, RED can afford to take this risk as a newcomer to this complicated market sector, going rogue on a mobile technology and media format that absolutely won’t bring them a quick payoff.  This thing will take time.

After emerging from the tent, what I stood to gain from the man himself were some finer points for filmmakers that haven’t been reported by other writers in the general tech world.  Let’s start with that stuff, distilling about ten minutes of one-on-one conversation, then I’ll wrap up with my hands-on impressions.  Important clarification:  the Hydrogen isn’t out yet, so features may change in the next few months.

CONVERSATION WITH JIM JANNARD

Will the internal cameras at launch time shoot with any kind of log color profile, to extend dynamic range and protect highlights?  Any chance of 10-bit 4:2:2 into a durable, high-bitrate codec?  Any optical image stabilization or lens adapter capability?

Jim didn’t specifically deny that there will be a log profile at launch, but overall emphasized that when it comes to the internal camera especially, RED is developing it for mass-market consumer expectations, and it won’t perform any differently in 2D than today’s other top-of-the-line smartphone cameras.  I think he would have confirmed those capture specs I asked him about, if they were planned for launch, so we can expect none such prosumer/professional video features from the internal camera and its pertaining capture software.  It remains to be seen whether the imaging can be exploited by third-party Android app developers, such as FiLMiC Pro that actually does empower smartphone cameras to shoot in a form of log color, at somewhat higher quality than their default severely compressed video codecs.  Jim averred that the design of the Hydrogen would be compromised if they incorporated even a 1-inch sensor (and that’s smaller even than Micro Four Thirds, while on the other hand, my tiny Sony RX0 has got a 1-inch sensor).  Then there needs to be two each for front and rear 3D capture, a total of four.  I estimated to him that the target buyer for the Hydrogen might really be a majority of low-budget indie filmmakers who’d have valued the extreme portability of a reasonably good stock camera at launch, something to use in a pinch that could have a fighting chance getting color graded to match other RED cameras (or Blackmagic/Sony/Canon/Panasonic log capture).  As of this week, subject to change, the promised modular cinema camera attachment is at least 12 months away from release, so it really won’t be a meaningful factor to anyone considering a Hydrogen now.

Speaking of the modular cinema camera attachment, I brought up Blackmagic’s Pocket Cinema Camera 4K announced at NAB, testing how he would view that in competition.  Jim was really adamant that his Hydrogen, paired with the envisioned modular camera attachment, will perform at a much higher level – but when I broached pricing, he clarified that it won’t be at the BMPCC4K’s price point of under $1.3k.  Thus it seems to me that the combined investment of a Hydrogen and its camera accessory could rise above the cost of even a basic current-generation RED cinema camera.  But after meeting the entrepreneur himself, it did resonate more than ever with me, that RED in comparison to someone like Sony (or even Blackmagic, who cross-subsidizes cameras from their other income) is just apples and oranges:  RED has always needed to price things just a hairline away from profit margins, up or down, as an indie designer/manufacturer working outside the system.  Bottom line, technology in this sector changes so rapidly, that I think the Hydrogen might not ever evolve into a cinema camera device (besides acting as a remote control for a fully separate RED cinema camera).  It’s all about mobile 3D.  Speaking of which…

Will the RED’s own new 3D video format be cross-compatible with the Google VR180 format that plays natively from YouTube?  Can VR180 content, acquired through camera products like the Lenovo Mirage and Yi Horizon, play straight from the Hydrogen in 3D?  What about stereoscopic 360-degree video?

Jim sounded really optimistic about the Hydrogen being able to play back anything you throw at it.  From there, I suppose things get a little complicated.  I asked about the VR180 format, coming from my personal resignation as a VR filmmaker these days that it’s really the best immersive compromise in favor of video resolution/clarity, until bandwidths and processing power can handle full-quality stereoscopic 360-degree immersion.  Expressing this, I asked whether RED was going to be “fighting against” the old delivery system of equirectangular video, which terribly compromises VR quality by squeezing a distorted image into a conventionally rectangular video frame – and he answered an enthusiastic yes.  That said, the Hydrogen will resist 360-degree deployment and especially the rapidly outdating Cardboard/Daydream/Samsung model of sandwiching a smartphone inside goggles.  Simply put, Hydrogen isn’t about 360 degrees.  It’s about so-called “4V” imaging from its screen, without goggles or special glasses as a middle layer, because the screen itself is meant to be tilted around in a kind of miniature 4View experience that extends beyond stereography.  (They use the buzzword holographic, yet it’s really not true holography that would fire lasers into a fixed viewing centrum with light interference.)

But back to the specific question, VR180 files won’t need to be converted into RED’s proprietary H4V file format, and the Hydrogen display will show depth in VR180 files.  It does not seem likely that the Hydrogen’s gyroscopic sensors can empower the viewer to pivot around a 180-degree field of view, per the VR180 format’s full capability, and what’s unfortunate about that is, stereoscopic depth in VR180 is harder to appreciate when forced to look only straight ahead into content captured from a stationary camera.  As to YouTube playing back VR180 content on the Hydrogen’s display, with depth, Jim sounded a little more optimistic than I think we’ll ultimately see.  Deployment of YouTube content is really locked down by Google, and limited to either the Android YouTube app itself, or embedding at a mobile web browser – down to the level of mandatory branding of the YouTube logo visible at all times, hyperlinking to YouTube.com.  Unless RED negotiates with Google’s developers for an app update that integrates Hydrogen functionality, it seems to me that the world’s biggest repository of 3D video content simply won’t be accessible on the Hydrogen, short of ripping downloads into side-loaded video files for local playback.  RED is of course investing a lot into its online repository of user-generated Hydrogen content, called RED Channel:  whether that new platform rises to dominance in the worldwide field, or never has a fighting chance against Google and the like, remains to be seen.  But odds are always in favor of the bullies, and RED’s focus on their proprietary file format, not playable at launch on any non-RED devices for even just a stereoscopic experience (e.g., Oculus Go), feels intuitively to me like the undermining of the whole product.  I wish that H4V were designed as an additional layer on top of the VR180 format for maximum cross-compatibility.  But this is another thing that remains to be seen, and the early adopters are the guinea pigs – I’m one of them, having placed my order inside of the first minute orders got taken.

THE PHONE

Everyone is bound to evaluate this thing on a few levels, but I’d break it down into three:  is it a good phone; how’s the “holographic” display; and how’s the binaural audio?  When it comes to the phone itself, these pictures I snapped (lit-up screen was forbidden) speak for themselves.  Of course, it’s big and heavy.  And the screen doesn’t go all the way out to the edges, clear of any bezel, which is the latest passing fashion that’s really a play for profits by the smartphone manufacturers (do we really care pragmatically?).  The main screen looked to me like stock Android, thankfully – no HTC Sense bloat, or the like – and it’s been widely reported that carrier negotiations are coming together, with AT&T and Verizon already on board.  I asked them about Project Fi, at least via an extra data SIM, because that’s how I roll (it’s by far the best deal for service, ICYMI) – but while the RED reps didn’t know for sure, they noted that the phone is unlocked (of course).  Since Project Fi rides on Sprint, T-Mobile and U.S. West as an MVNO, it remains to be seen, for just one example among the many MVNOs like Straight Talk, etc.  My guess is, probably:  the Hydrogen comes equipped with internal LTE radios for every major spectrum class worldwide.

I was happy to see a USB-C port at the bottom, instead of a Micro-USB hangover that’s honestly extinct by now (seriously, Oculus Go).  There was a temporary label for MicroSD at the top of the phone, an audio headphone jack, and the flat multi-connector bus on the back of the phone that will interface with expansion modules many months after launch, well into 2019 if at all.  Inside, the central processing unit is a 2017-model Snapdragon 835, which happens to be snappy-ish, but slower than the 2018-model Snapdragon 845 found in today’s Galaxy S9 among others.  If you do end up trying to use the Hydrogen as a conventional VR playback device in a viewer, it may not even be able to keep up with today’s baseline spec of 4K 60fps or higher equirectangular video.

THE SCREEN

But straight from Jim Jannard’s mouth, the Hydrogen, at launch, is all about the screen.  I showed you that children’s book earlier:  to be honest, that’s roughly what you get, were it time-based media (i.e., video).  RED is demoing the screen using content from the domain of familiar movies and television shows, such as animated characters and action flicks.  Stereoscopic cinematography today tends to be subtler than years past – no more paddleball bouncing straight at you as in Vincent Price’s House of Wax 3D – so the choice to use familiar existing content might have been ill-advised, to really show off the Hydrogen’s capacity for presenting depth.  At best, there was a moment when confetti burst into the foreground, and that was awesome; but generally, the depth perception I saw really did approximate those old children’s book panels, with their ridged plastic texture – and just like that, images even bounced a little between angles, stills especially.  I don’t think it was a LAUREL vs. YANNY thing with my eyes, either.

That 4View-like ability to peek around objects did work, though, differentiating this technology from mere stereoscopic content.  But the perceived depth was so limited, that the wow factor wasn’t there.  And even inside the dark tent, it looked like the total nits of brightness must be compromised by the “holographic” technology, which makes sense.  I saw the total nits of brightness get higher/more normal when leaving the Hydrogen playback app – though as much as I like stock Android, hopefully RED will design a standard “launcher” OS layer that makes the app icons appear raised above a recessed wallpaper (adding related animations with depth, too).

If the “holographic” screen is the Hydrogen’s calling card, that’s probably the right place to consider its $1.2k price tag (or $1.6k if you want a titanium chassis, FWIW).  Even if I felt disappointed by the Hydrogen’s screen technology, this is a great example of an inevitable new technology that we’ll all use someday, rolling out as a luxury item in its infancy.  Let’s be real: the Hydrogen’s demographic is upper-middle class Americans with disposable income, up to the wealthiest consumers!  But so are Elon Musk’s Tesla automobiles, and like that, RED has lots to be proud of:  they did this outside the entrenched systems and economies of scale in gigantic smartphone corporations like Samsung, LG, HTC, and Apple (albeit, Apple is always last to adopt newest/best technologies, right?).  Modularity can mean that an investment in the Hydrogen will grow with the times; yet that Snapdragon 835 stuck inside might be its Achille’s heel, as the Android OS keeps bloating – something else that remains to be seen.  I sure hope that the Hydrogen will launch with Oreo.

THE SOUND

OK, bonus round.  This is a feature that’s honestly not very hardware-dependent, and disingenuous as an exclusive feature.  For several decades, binaural audio and Ambisonics in particular has been an available tool for “positional” sound – these days, we’re using it in tandem with VR head-tracking so that sounds really stay where they’re coming from.  Keep in mind that the Hydrogen isn’t really interested in 360-degree presentation.  So why is it important to hear sounds behind you versus in front of you, when you’re always looking forward?  Well, surround sound is a real thing, and filmmakers use it just a little bit for films that we watch straight-ahead.  But binaural audio (i.e., simulating surround sound through delivery merely into left and right drivers) is something that thrives in full immersion.

Back to the Hydrogen, RED paired their demo tent with a “sound van” seen here, where visitors took turns putting on a pair of headphones wired into a Hydrogen.  They used headphones that were honestly pretty lo-fi, and not even circumaural (i.e., not completely covering the ears), thus prone to background interference.  I’ve also heard much better binaural audio content, whereas in this case, the positional sound was very rear-heavy with little information from the front.  The vitality of binaural audio is ultimately determined right up to the post-production stage, and playback is after-the-fact.  The most that a playback device can offer is high-resolution audio for the most faithful reproduction, and it’s true that most smartphones lack that.  But there’s nothing new coming out of the Hydrogen sound-wise; it’s all about the content going in.  The product does tout an “H3O” conversion algorithm from stereo content, but that’s a fairly random application of directionality compared to the real thing.

That said, there are stereo front-facing speakers, and they sound great.  It’s something weirdly out of fashion these days in smartphones; I remember how revolutionary it was when the HTC One worked stereo front-facing speakers into the bezel with surprisingly firm bass response, adding so-called “Boom Sound.”  Few others followed, and smartphones always sound much tinnier than they should.  The Hydrogen gets this right.

WRAP-UP

RED describes their customer service as “white glove,” and they promise to accept order cancellations anytime and even returns after delivery.  They are releasing an initial batch of pre-orders (guess that’s me) before going into full production in tandem with telecom carrier delivery via AT&T and Verizon.  They say they’re on track for August delivery, but of course (like anywhere), it’s subject to change.  I can tell there’s a lot of people in the RED universe who are used to waiting, who will wait as long as it takes.  I never thought this would happen, but now I’m warming up to RED.  Maybe it’s a hometown thing.

June 5, 2018 FocusPulling Original, VRcine Leave a Comment
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