At an HTC Vive product showcase earlier this week in China, 360 video streaming company Visbit made a big announcement. The company launched an 8K VR Player for HTC’s new Vive Focus headset.
The app launched Wednesday on Viveport alongside the Vive Focus’s launch in China. The Vive Focus is HTC’s first standalone headset, so it doesn’t require a PC or smartphone to operate.
Visbit claims that the 8K VR Player will be able to playback up to 8K stereoscopicVideo shot with two parallel cameras (or in the case of 360° video, multiple pairs of parallel cameras) Commonly referr... More 360 videos, either streamed or downloaded. This is made possible through Visbit’s View-Optimized Viewing (VVOS) technology, where only the portion of the video you’re looking at renders at full resolutionThe number of pixels in an image, typically presented as a ratio of the total pixels on x axis to the total pixels on th... More at any given moment.
The player also supports spatial audio and video encryption.
Of course, experiences are still limited by headset resolutions (the Vive Focus is equipped with a 2,880 x 1,600 single-piece AMOLED display). But hopefully this announcement will encourage more content creators to make use of their 8K videos. In fact, Visbit is asking for VR content creators wishing to showcase their VR videos with resolutions of 6K and above for free. Just contact the Visbit team at partnership@visbit.co.
“Our Obsidian camera has been able to shoot 8K 360 3D videos for a long time,” said Dan Chen, CEO of Kandao (makers of the Obsidian R and S 360 cameras). “However, due to the lack of 8K VR video player, we had to compress our demo videos to 4K to play, which significantly discounted the demonstration effectiveness. Now Visbit 8K VR Player resolved our problem.”
“Designed with 3K resolutionThe number of pixels in an image, typically presented as a ratio of the total pixels on x axis to the total pixels on th... More and 75Hz refresh rateThe frequency at which an image is drawn on screen during playback, expressed as the number of cycles per second (hertz)... More AMOLED screen, the Vive Focus standalone enables viewing of 8K resolutionThe number of pixels in an image, typically presented as a ratio of the total pixels on x axis to the total pixels on th... More and is the perfect HMD for experiencing high-resolution VR videos,” said Alvin Wang Graylin, HTC China President of VR.
The 8K VR Player app is currently free to download–for a limited time–for the Vive Focus. Visbit said it plans to rollTerm meaning “record,” dating back to a time when physical film was rolled on an axle past the gate of a camera. out the player to other standalone and mobile headsets, including the Mi VR Standalone, Oculus Go, Pico Goblin.
