Ever since I bought the HTC Vive, I’ve been very interested in the current methods of capturing moments that can then be re-played back at a future time.
There is of course 360deg video, which gives you a flat spherical 2D image/video of the world around the subject at the time of recording. One better is 3D spherical video which gives 2 separate 2D video streams (one for each eye) to give you the feeling of immersion, by providing your brain with depth information due to giving each eye a separate image.
And that’s it.  Well there’s video games, but that’s not really a recording.

Part of the immersion that VR gives you is the ability to see the VR space from your own perspective. Being able to look around is one ingredient to the immersion. Another layer to that is the ability to translate oneself laterally (move around) the environment.

I want to record the moment as a three dimensional scan of the environment. Upon playback you are afforded not just 360deg view but also ability to move around the scene to view the moment from different angles. And what if the moment captured wasn’t a snapshot in time, but rather many moments captured sequentially (like the frames of a movie) through which one could navigate and watch from any perspective?

This would not be a ‘video’ stream per say, but rather a data stream of three dimensional polygon data that would then be reconstructed at the time of playback.

Now the question is, how to accomplish this… …to be continued.