About: 360 Labs is a Portland, Oregon based production company specialized in 360º videos, virtual tours, custom Google Street View, and VR experiences.
360 Labs was officially founded in May of 2014. Its core team of co-founders all started as panoramic photographers and part of the Google Trusted Photographer program starting in 2012. When another surge of VR popularity arose, they naturally became inclined to produce more content with 360 videos.
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Each of the three co-founders have a unique background.
Matt Rowell was a web developer and digital media producer for a well-known agency in Portland, producing video content for eLearning applications for fortune 500 brands.
Thomas Hayden shot his first 360 video content more than a decade ago for Immersive Media, a pioneer in the 360 VR video industry and the original company to produce Google Street View content for its launch in 2007.
Brad Gill has been a professional photographer since 2007, and as a recent graduate with a degree in Advertising Management, was eager to find good business use cases for 360/VR content.
For the founders, one VR film that holds a special place in their heart is 360 Labs’ Grand Canyon documentary, “as it is.” Their team started this project when the company was just getting started, when the production team had lots of time on their hands as there weren’t many paying clients. Matt mentions they would not have even been able to afford the necessary equipment and outfitter costs to start on this endeavor without the help of Google and Western River Expeditions.
Later when VR became explosively popular, the team’s services met with huge demand and they got really busy. “It’s a nice problem to have, but unfortunately it puts passion projects on the back-burner,” Matt says.
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There were many challenges shooting in the Grand Canyon unimaginable under normal situations. On their multi-day river trip, there were no outlets to charge their batteries, no room on commercial boats to bring generators or laptops, and if you wanted to bring all that extra gear on a private boat instead, “those permits can take years to obtain,” according to Matt.
The team started the project in 2014, when the GoPro Hero3+ was the only 360 camera option on the market for a reasonable price, and working with multiple unsynced GoPros certainly brought about much technical hassle. Features that new creators take for granted today simply did not exist back then.
Despite that, even today, the 6k 48fps footage really holds up. With new features like D.WARP from AutoPano Video and affordable optical flow stitching from Mistika VR, today’s results are better than ever before when re-stitching older content.
Currently, 360 Labs is making a huge push to complete “As it is” this winter, and has just wrapped another production trip back in November. They’ve already captured just about every rapid, incredible scenes from hikes all over the canyon and amazing views from the national park. What they felt they were still missing were the native voices they needed to tell the whole story. “As any documentarian can tell you, it can take time to build this trust, you can’t just force an interview.”
Fortunately, they have made some huge progress on this point, and expect release soon, free on VeeR and other platforms. 360 Labs also released the newest trailer for “as it is” recently on VeeR, which has garnered over 12,000 views to date:
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Source: Veer VR BLOG