In year 2007, Google launched Streetview in US that enabled users to see locations and move along the images. This was simply amazing then. But how about having a 360 degree real life virtual experience while playing a video!

A hi-tech Netherland based firm yellowbird has come up with a solution by promising to offer the chance to users to direct their own 360 degree exploration of a place or event such as a music festival. Unlike Streetview where scenes were frozen in pictures, here, Yellowbird aims to take its viewers through virtual tours in the videos. This will enable users to look around and decide for themselves what they really need to see or look at in a particular scene. This means that users will use mouse cursor to navigate around the scenes even when the video is being played. This is going to be real great experience which you can see for yourself in this concert video:

Yellowbird has achieved this by using a video camera with six divided lenses to capture the 360 degree scenes simultaneously covering all possible viewing direction in video with sound, rather than simple photographs. Whereas the Google’s StreetView cameras was car mounted, yellowBird’s multi-lenses camera is carried by a human operator:

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On completion of shooting, footage is stitched into a single image stream video and saved into Flash format and can be embedded on web page. Presently, the camera is setup on a tripod or to "float" above the head of the camera operator – and it then takes about a week to stitch a 60 minute video together. The technology was recently demonstrated live at TEDx Amsterdam as well. At the moment, the technology is not available as yet to business yet.