During ATAP’s breakout session this morning they demonstrated a slew of amazing technology. Many of which I will get to as time allows. Yes, they showed Project Ara booting nearly instantly along with hot swapping the camera module and taking a photo. Among the myriad announcements of amazing tech was a smaller, but very exciting, announcement. The Motorola Spotlight Player has become Google Spotlight Stories.
While not a milestone announcement, it is still one that is quite fun. The Spotlight stories app brings immersive story telling to users around the world. In a nutshell, you launch the story you want to watch and interact with and you are able to hold your phone up and look in different directions.It really lets you get mixed in the story and gives you the feeling that you are part of the story.
ATAP partnered up with Justin Lin, the guy that brought us all the Fast & Furious movies, to bring a pretty outstanding Spotlight Story that is real life video in the form of a short movie called Help. He used a specialized set of cameras that caught the story in full 360 degrees.
At their booth they showed the Epic RED 6k cameras, as seen above, and it was actually live streaming to a TV. You could grab the Xbox controller and spin the view around. The interesting thing was it didn’t spin the camera, just what was displayed. They had a set of computers behind a wall that was handling all the real-time stitching of the imagery.
It is a pretty thrilling visual adventure. They took the experience one step further and created a complete new audio experience for Help that delivers the sound from the movie and the environment to your ears based on where you are looking. Technical terms they talked about were ambisonics and binaural rendering.
If your device is supported you should really head off to the Play Store and get the new Google Spotlight Stories app installed and pick up Help. it is a really unique experience.
