How do you process and stitch 360° video for VR playback?

Processing and stitching 360° video for VR playback involves capturing, aligning, and rendering footage to create a seamless spherical view. The process starts with capturing raw video from multiple cameras arranged in a rig to cover all angles. Each camera records a portion of the scene, and overlapping fields of view ensure there’s enough data to stitch the footage together. For example, a common setup might use six cameras in a cube formation or two 180° fisheye lenses facing opposite directions. The key challenge is aligning these perspectives accurately, accounting for differences in exposure, lens distortion, and parallax errors caused by the physical separation between cameras.

Stitching software like Autopane, Mistika VR, or OpenCV-based tools is used to combine the footage. First, lens distortion is corrected using calibration profiles specific to each camera and lens. Next, feature-matching algorithms identify overlapping points in adjacent frames to align the videos spatially. For instance, a tree branch captured by two cameras must be mapped to the same 3D position in the final output. Advanced tools automate this process but often require manual adjustments, especially in complex scenes with moving objects or poor lighting. After alignment, the stitched footage is projected onto a spherical or equirectangular format, which maps the 360° view onto a 2D plane for editing and encoding. This projection is the standard format used by VR platforms like YouTube VR or Oculus.

For playback, the equirectangular video is encoded with resolutions matching VR headset capabilities (e.g., 5.7K or 8K) to avoid pixelation. Developers must optimize bitrates to balance quality and performance—H.265 compression is often used to reduce file size. Spatial audio is synchronized to match visual perspectives, requiring tools like Facebook’s 360 Spatial Workstation. Finally, the video is integrated into a VR player using SDKs like WebXR or Unity’s XR toolkit, which handles head tracking and renders the correct viewport based on the user’s orientation. Testing across devices is critical to ensure smooth playback, as latency or frame drops can disrupt immersion. Techniques like foveated rendering (reducing peripheral detail) may also be applied to improve performance on lower-end hardware.