The Story
In 2013, we happened upon the very first Samsung VR devices, and at the same time we saw the quintessential problem of any new form of media — the content paradox. It’s a classical chicken-and-egg problem: people buy hardware to consume media, but people don’t make media for which there is no hardware in circulation. While we appreciated the then-Oculus viewpoint on gaming, we also saw that the first step of any screen technology is media consumption. And thus Beyond was born.
The goal of Beyond was not to simply make a 360 camera, but to make a 360 camera that sees like a human, with the same between-eye parallax distance and focal characteristics optically captured. The optics and physical design interacted with each other, which eventually led to our prototype device with 17 cameras, 72 processing cores, and an internal throughput of 25 Gbps.
When we took the prototypes to our media partners, the response was immediate and positive, but we wanted to do more. We wanted to allow people to seamlessly place-shift to an NFL box, an NBA court-side seat, the edge of the mat at Olympic gymnastics, or under the waters of Bora Bora. And so we built our own GPU-powered stitchers and an interface that allowed the Beyond camera to achieve seamless switching with a light-to-light latency of half a second — a world record to this day. This technical coup-de-grace led to a product that won the 2016 CES Innovation Award.
Relevant in 2024
With the new generation of VR and AR devices, we are seeing a renewed understanding that lean-back content consumption will be a big part of the future of these devices. As noted by Ars Technica and many others, the content problem faced by Apple Vision Pro (and all others) is driven by the difficulty of production, making the technology behind the Beyond system highly relevant even nearly a decade later.
