GoPro goes ‘4D’ with Timeslice

Tim Macmillan and 53 GoPros

Pioneering bullet time company Timeslice introduces ‘4D’ 360 degree video scanning, with a little help from 53 GoPro cameras.

People have been building GoPro arrays for almost as long as the company has been manufacturing them, with Google even getting in on the act via a 16-camera setup. Now comes the most ambitious one yet, with 53 individual GoPro Hero3+ Black Edition cameras rigged in a near-encapsulating enclosure and fully synchronised to record video footage in three dimensions, or as its creators call it ‘4D’ capture.

The company responsible for the technology is TimeSlice, a London-based studio founded by Tim Macmillan, an image capture artist whose multi-camera array experiments predate The Matrix and even the Michel Gondry-directed ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ music video. In fact his first custom single-frame/multi-capture rig was demonstrated on BBC television programme Tomorrow’s World way back in 1993.

Development of this new device involved a blend of ‘experimental’ capture technology from GoPro and a mix of Timeslice’s own custom hardware and software. The company plans to add volumetric video capture to its range of multi-cam services. A taste of what can be achieved with the system can be viewedhere, this movable digitally rendered portrait of Macmillan enables the viewer to rotate around and alter the zoom as the ‘video’ replays.