The Fascinating Math Behind Virtual Reality
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September 17, 2019

Have you experienced VR – Virtual Reality? This is a 3D VR180 video, which means you can look all around you in a 180-degree hemisphere. You’ll see our video is 3 dimensions, just like in real life! We recommend you wear a VR headset for the full effect. If you don’t have VR goggles, that’s ok! Just swipe around on your phone and you’ll still get to see the hemisphere.

Did you know that it takes a lot of math to make VR videos work? In this video, we’ll explain the role of math in virtual reality – from Snell’s Law and the optics of VR cameras, which is needed to understand how light is bent by the fisheye lenses in the camera and captured onto the camera’s sensor; to projection mapping – how a curved image is drawn onto a flat surface.

We experience depth in real life thanks to a phenomenon called “parallax” – and we’ll talk about how this effect is replicated in VR videos.

We’d like to thank the YouTube Creator Lab and VR Scout for giving Socratica the opportunity to learn how to make VR videos for you! Stay tuned as we continue to explore this new technology in several future videos.