Fund this: Turn your iPhone into a VR rig with Shot camera add-on
For as little as $69 on Kickstarter, you can capture virtual-reality photos and videos using just your phone.
Virtual reality -- VR for short -- is rapidly shaping up to be the Next Big Thing, with products ranging from Google Cardboard to Oculus Rift to Samsung's new Gear VR promising amazing virtual experiences.
Of course, if you want to produce, rather than just watch, your own VR content, it's going to cost a small fortune, right? Even the "consumer" Google/GoPro Odyssey rig runs $15,000.
Enter Shot, an iPhone 6-series camera add-on that can capture VR video and stills. It's a Kickstarter project in search of $100,619 in funding -- with 27 days left to get there.
At first blush, the Shot resembles any number of other iPhone clip-on lenses, with one exception: It puts one lens over the rear-facing camera and another over the front one.
When you fire up the Shot companion app and capture a photo, you get one from each camera. The software then stitches the two together for a 360-degree image.
As for video, the developers rightly point out that Apple's iOS software doesn't allow for simultaneous recording from both cameras, so instead the Shot gives you a 235-degree angle from the rear camera, "equivalent to looking around while you are sitting on a chair."
The resulting photos and videos can be viewed in Google Cardboard and other VR headsets, and in fact the Shot kit bundles one of the former.
The product will come in versions for iPhone 6 and 6S, and iPhone 6 Plus and 6S Plus.
Early backers have already snapped up all the available Shots at the $55 level, but there are still some left at $69, which converts to around £45 or AU$100. (The production version will sell for around $90.) The expected delivery date is April, 2016, but if you've ever backed a Kickstarter project before, you know that those dates frequently slip, and sometimes slip hard. You can find Shot on Kickstarter here.
What's your take? Are you ready to start recording VR photos and videos during vacations, big events and the like?