유튜브, 가상현실(VR) 동영상 지원 YouTube’s Grand Plan to Make VR Accessible to Everybody(VIDEO)

기존 동영상도 VR모드 아이콘 누르면 감상 가능

구글 카드보드로 VR 생태계 넓힌다는 계획

edited by kcontents 

케이콘텐츠 편집

유튜브가 가상현실(VR)동영상을 지원한다. 기존 동영상도 VR로 감상할 수 있게 돼 보다 현실감있는 경험을 구현할 계획이다. 5일(현지시간) 유튜브는 공식 블로그를 통해 "VR은 더욱 몰입감있는 경험을 제공한다"며 "그래서 우리는 새로운 안드로이드 유튜브 애플리케이션(앱)에 VR기능을 추가하기로 결정했다"고 밝혔다. 가상현실 동영상(사진=유튜브 공식 블로그)유튜브는 새롭게 추가되는 동영상 뿐 아니라 이미 게재된 동영상도 VR로 볼 수 있도록 지원할 계획이다. 이에 유튜브는 동영상 내에 VR모드 아이콘을 추가했다. 일반 동영상도 VR기기를 착용한 채 해당 아이콘만 누르면 감상할 수 있다. 유튜브는 "어떠한 비디오도 구글 카드보드로 감상할 수 있다"며 "단순히 카드보드 옵션만 누르면 실제 상황 속에 빠져드는 경험을 할 수 있다"고 말했다. 구글 카드보드외에 삼성전자의 기어VR 등 스마트폰을 호환하는 VR기기로도 유튜브 VR 동영상을 감상할 수 있다. 해당 기능은 아직까지 안드로이드에서만 적용된다. 유튜브는 iOS버전에 대한 업데이트 일정은 밝히지 않았다. 한편, 구글은 그동안 자사의 서비스에 VR을 구현하기 위한 업데이트를 지속해왔다. 지난달 12일 구글은 실제 환경을 360도 입체 이미지로 보여주는 스트리트 뷰에서 VR기능을 추가했다. 또, 구글은 카드보드를 활용하려는 앱 개발자들을 위한 소프트웨어 개발 킷(SDK)도 업데이트했다. 이를 통해 구글 카드보드를 중심으로 VR 생태계를 확대한다는 계획이다. 구글에 따르면, 카드보드 앱은 현재 100개 국가에서 39개 언어로 활용되고 있다. 구글 플레이 기준 이 앱은 현재 1500만 다운로드를 기록하고 있다. [아시아경제 안하늘 기자] ahn708@asiae.co.kr

IT’S A RARE sunny day in Seattle, Washington, and I’m standing in the grass outside a nondescript office building with engineers in hoodies strolling nearby. One of them, weirdly, is riding a unicycle. I look behind me; there’s a canal, with water streaming by soothingly. I look down and notice a dark, narrow shadow in the grass. Maybe it’s the shadow of a strangely shaped tree? I look up—yes, there are a few trees around, but none that would cast a shadow that looked that misshapen.

“There’s a weird shadow on the ground,” I say out loud, knowing someone would be able to explain it to me.

Kurt Wilms and Husain Bengali, product managers for YouTube and Jump, at the YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California.  CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/WIRED

“Oh—that must be the Jump camera rig.” I hear the disembodied voice of Husain Bengali, a product manager at Jump, Google’s virtual reality platform.

Time to get back to reality. I lower Google’s virtual reality set, Cardboard, that I’ve been holding up to my face, and instantly I’m back in a spartan room—which had been scrubbed clean of confidential blueprints before my arrival, I’m told—at YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, California. Bengali was showing me the first ever 360-degree virtual reality video made by his team, hastily filmed right outside the Jump offices by Lake Washington Ship Canal in Seattle. “After we created that video and I watched it, that was the first moment I realized our team was on the right track,” Bengali beams. He’s part of the group leading the charge for innovative virtual reality video formats, and I’m getting a demo of the work they’re releasing to the world today as part of YouTube’s big, um, jump into VR.

I can see why Bengali is so proud. The video is impressive—most of all, because I could see how close and far the objects in the scene were to me. The illusion of depth is convincing. The guy on the unicycle (one of the Jump engineers, apparently) was several feet away. The other guys were walking closer to me. And the stream of water, right behind me, seemed near enough that I could jump in if I wanted to.

Cardboard, Google’s cheap virtual reality headset.  CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/WIRED

Today, YouTube is unveiling 360-degree virtual reality videos and a virtual movie theater for all YouTube videos, available to anyone with a Google Cardboard headset. The features launch today for its Android app, and are coming “soon” for iOS. The goal is to “democratize virtual reality” and “bring VR to everybody, no matter who you are or what your favorite piece of content is,” YouTube says. “Virtual reality makes the experience of being there even more awesome and immersive.”

At launch, YouTube is featuring ten or so lifelike, 360-degree VR videos that the company shot itself. These include a tour of an Icelandic glacier, a performance by a violinist, and a computer-generated recreation of the Apollo 11 moon landing. But Bengali says he expects that library of content to grow “very rapidly,” especially as the company works with YouTube creators to get more VR content up on the platform. Any video, meanwhile, that had been filmed to showcase YouTube’s 360-degree video technology, which it unveiled in March, is viewable using a smartphone and Cardboard, too.

In an even more ambitious move, YouTube is also making every clip in its massive database viewable in a “virtual movie theater.” Tap the Cardboard button that now appears within the YouTube app while watching video on your phone, and the video view changes. You can pop your phone into Cardboard and watch the clip in a kind of floating theater view. When you move your head, you’re prompted to “click to recenter” the clip, and view readjusts right with you. It would be great, one can imagine, for watching YouTube clips in bed with the VR headset balanced on your face.

“This is not just the first time that people can watch Jump virtual reality video, but any VR video,” Bengali says.

http://www.wired.com/2015/11/youtube-360-virtual-reality-video/

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