A party was held in the snow-covered Alps in the Allgäu region of Germany. More than 800 snowboarders, including Europe’s elite, traveled to Nesselwang last January to attend the grand opening of Red Bull’s new Street Snowpark. And even those who couldn’t be there were able to enjoy the entire program as if they were right in the middle of it. Special mirror camera constructions on three stations provided more than twelve hours of full HD video recordings in a 360-degree panorama view. What was special about this was that these transmissions were broadcast live and could be viewed online via streaming. Everyone who downloaded the special app was able to experience the happenings at the winter sports park through their iPhones or iPads and then using their index fingers was able to select the camera stations or control the direction of view.
A vision begins to come to life with this new development for Michael Kanna. ”Sometime in the future, we will wear virtual eyeglasses and experience the world from a 360-degree perspective,” the Managing Director of Videostream 360 is convinced. The young team of the German company based in Leipzig has written a success story on the way to achieving this. It all began at the Leipzig College of Technology, Business and Culture (HTWK). In 2009, as part of his Master’s thesis in Media Information Technology, one of the company’s founders developed the principles for a method of equalizing the circular 360-degree moving pictures that were obtained using specially shaped panorama mirrors. In the years that followed, this finally became Videostream 360 – a company and a patented technology on real-time transmission of 360-degree video streams. This technology had previously not been possible because it required costly multi-lens cameras, whose images then needed to be tediously converted into rectangular pictures. ”The Patent Information Center in Leipzig informed us that a system like ours did not yet exist anywhere in the world,” Michael Kanna notes.
