Just received a suction mount from Amazon which was delayed.

But now that it's in hand I can mount my VR180 camera to my car. In this case I mounted it to the interior of the passenger side T-top glass. It provides the perspective of riding along shotgun in the car but if you look down you have no body! Do it, it's a gas!

Videos on Facebook

Real time driving with sound
10x timelapse driving without sound
I've once again hosted the videos on Facebook. Sorry for the inconvenience. As usual you'll get the best experience looking at these in a VR headset of some kind.

A note about stabilization:

Click play for the Youtube treatment (2D video translation)

I tried rendering some of the footage with stabilization on and it yielded some interesting results. Previously I wasn't certain if my camera software did pixel tracking or if it relied more on IMU rotation data to smooth things out. After stabilizing the car footage it's clearly using IMU data because the results were that the scenery outside the car was smoothed out while the car bounced around as it traversed bumps in the road. It's kind of a sickening sensation when looking at the interior of the car when in VR. I elected to keep stabilization off for the videos as having some shaking of both the interior and the scenery was a less nauseating compromise.

Speaking of nausea

recording VR180 with motion can often invoke motion sickness. In this case seeing the car surround you provides a point of reference which helps most people feel comfortable. There's less disconnect between what you're seeing and what your inner ear is telling you about how your head is moving. I've been trying out taking VR footage from my drone but that can be a bit rough to watch if you're prone to motion sickness. Comparatively the car footage should be an easier view.

In some ways the 3D is cool and in others it isn't.

The interior of the car looks like it's right in front of you like you can touch it. But the scenery looks kind of flat because there are few times other objects get close enough for the 3D effect to be prominent. One thing I would like to do sometime is mount the camera outside the car and close to the ground which would be a nice effect of the road zipping by. But more on exterior mounting later.

My windows weren't super clean because I haven't done a wash in a while for reasons of shelter in place. Streaks and spots on the glass do add some dimension though. I didn't want to drive dangerously close to things just for the sake of getting more interesting shots. As it is the scenery more or less looks like a distant plane which is OK I guess.

Why not video from the exterior of the car?

I might do that sometime soon but last year I lost an action cam and suction mount when they were on the body of my car. I had driven several miles before stopping to retrieve the footage. The camera and mount were both gone! Retracing my route I found nothing. It's possible I needed to clean the patch of car I mounted to before applying the suction cup. I was a little sloppy because I had good luck several occasions before that incident. So with the current camera I'm a little gunshy to try an exterior mount just yet. I should probably do some tests thoroughly cleaning the mount area and using a dummy weight so that at worst I'll lose just the mount during testing. I also suspect that mounting to the glass provides a superior hold. Also mounting to the sides of my car it's hard to find really flat areas as the body work is pretty curvy.

For next time.

I'd like to do some longer videos. Large stretches of what I recorded during this session were facing the Sun and way over exposed everything outside. I was looking forward to reviewing footage of driving away from the Sun but I didn't record that leg of the trip because I stopped the camera when I thought I had started it. Oops.

I'm going to try to find some places that have interesting scenery above the car. You might have noticed that you can look up through the T-top. If I place the camera back a few inches more you'll be able to see more things directly above.

Yet again today's posting is the first part of experimenting with VR180 on a car mount. More and better things to come!

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