Why Spherical Video is a Bad Idea

a couple of years ago I was at a conference for science filmmakers and documentarians and there was a session on 360 video is that going to be the future of our medium and in that session they played a documentary that was shot in 360 and it was basically from a cruise ship up in Alaska massive landscapes huge glaciers falling off into the ocean and it was pretty amazing and they also showed viewers who were watching this documentary and headsets and then they interviewed those people afterwards and they were saying things like whoa that is so amazing if all documentaries were filmed in 360 maybe I would watch more documentaries and it was watching that when I realized 360 is really not going to be the future because even trying to convince ourselves that this is a great new technology I still felt like the people's reviews fell a bit flat and like they were just trying to fool themselves or they've been brought in specifically for this purpose and they were just trying not to disappoint the person that they were helping out so my view is that 360 video is just going to be a fad and this is a video on seven reasons why 360 video is not the future so let's start with a couple of technical points number one is resolution as you may have already noticed this video is a little bit soft even though it's shot in HD when you stretch that around in 360 well obviously it's going to be a little bit more pixelated than 360 in a small one part of the world now you might just say well obviously technology will get better over time and of course it will but I think we're still going to have problems even as the cameras get better even as the CPUs get better and the editing is made more possible we're still going to have the problem of bandwidth of trying to download and stream this stuff and then my point number two is that we're shooting with these wide-angle lenses everything except samey is pretty far away and so you're going to want to zoom in to get a closer look at certain things that you see around you but that again brings you back to point number one the resolution issue so my point is even for five or ten years into the future we're going to be struggling to have really sharp video that allows you to get close up with everything in the frame because obviously that is just a gigantic amount of information now moving past the technical concerns are I think the bigger problems with this technology which are what the more to come that that number three our brains just don't work this way we don't interpret the world by looking at all 360 degrees of what we have available to us typically we're looking ahead and our eyes also only have really the ability to resolve detail in a very small region so typically we are looking at a particular point in space and not much else and sure we could look behind us but we don't typically and I'm not sure that it adds that much to storytelling and I guess that brings up point number four if I am trying to tell you a story or explain to you some science I want to help direct your attention I want to show you the things that I think you need to see in order to understand what I'm talking about and I don't want you looking to the side or behind you you know kind of like that kid in class who's like staring out the back window when he should be paying attention to what's on the board I think it doesn't actually help to have more freedom I mean it sounds like it does and this is point number five a lot of people will make the argument that if we give people the opportunity to discover their world they will do a lot better than if we force them to look at particular things but I think that goes against what we know about learning I mean the whole point of having a teacher is to have someone who can eliminate the clutter for you and point out the things that you should be focusing on otherwise it's a bit like trying to learn science by pointing someone at the universe and just saying go go and figure out what's going on all of the advancements we've made in science have happened by really careful and close examination of the world and our ability to teach people that really requires stripping back all of the clutter all of the other distractions that people may get well involved in when they should be focusing on the salient features I have an example of this I shot a video a couple years ago where I dropped the tennis ball and asked a couple of girls whether I asked him to predict if it was speeding up I was going at a constant speed or slowing down or what was happening to the ball so this is very careful observation on the part of these people on the street so let's have a look at that video me too one would you say its speed was constant or do you think its speed was changing constant yeah it was the same yeah the whole way down yeah so there even if you're paying really close attention to your world you still don't notice acceleration because it's just one of those things it's really tough to see and my point is a lot of people will say well you got to see it to believe it but I think you have to believe it to see it the actual artistry of filmmaking comes from knowing what to show you and what not to show you and you know 360 video takes a lot of that control out of the hands of the creator and as yet I think there's no demonstrable point to making a video in this way I mean they're really just kind of atmospheric pieces granted I think you're getting a very nice look around the souls street markets here my final points point number seven is that I think love a hype around 360 video is based on this new technology that we can now do this at a reasonable price point and we've never been able to do it before and so obviously people are excited and I think that leads people to overstate what this potentially could do but I've seen this pattern before like in 1922 when Edison said that the motion picture would replace textbooks or a 94 when Semoran border said that that video discs would revolutionize education or in 2013 when the Atlantic said that massive open online courses would revolutionize it there is this real pattern of having new tech like 3d television sets and thinking that that changes everything and really it doesn't because fundamentally it misses the point of how our brains work our brains work in a nice linear way where we can we can tell stories in really finely crafted detail and showing you only the things that you need to see to get the point and without you missing something just because you were looking at the wrong point in the screen at the time so yeah if that is my viewpoint that 360 video is not the future of this medium then why did I buy this camera and oh why would I make a video in 360 and my answer is because I'm open to being wrong because when you think something is true you should try as hard as you can to just prove yourself and I'm trying that now so I'd love to hear your comments do you like 360 was this video interesting for you and would you like to see more of these in the future let me know in the comments below as I say I'm completely open to being wrong

Channel: 2veritasium

Views: 807,847

Keywords: 360 video, 360, VR, veritasium, 2veritasium, spherical, spherical video

Id: SrYZlkyjWsg

Length: 7min 43sec (463 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 04 2016