I’ve been recording my son’s hockey games with a traditional camera on a tripod setup. To be honest it is bit tedious to keep panning back and forth. Behind the camera you miss the experience of watching key parts of the game. Also not all hockey rinks are created equal so the camera placement options vary. I’ve been playing around with and idea how to get around these issues. What I have found is that 3d cameras with two or more fisheye lenses are getting much more accessible. There are couple of technical hurdles that needs to be solved, but that just means there is room to innovate.
The first thing to solve is to figure out the best placement for the camera. I assume the best location would be in the middle of the rink although that means there is a stereo video dead spot at the red line. It is not easy to arrange hanging the camera from the ceiling and there are nets on both ends. With a traditional camera it has been difficult to catch action on the nearside so hanging the camera on a long selfie stick on top of the rink would probably be a good option. We will need to try and see what works best.
Publishing the video content in 3d like it is of course possible, but viewing the 3x15min content with a VR headset is way too tiring for the eyes. So the answer really is to find ways of reframing the 360 equirectangular video to plain HD video in post-production. Some of the editors have motion detection plugins for overcapture, but we would also need a way to mask the areas outside of the playing area. Another option could be to crowd-source the panning to people watching on a VR headset. That would require a way to record the head movement data in the video player and server to average from multiple viewers.
Fideocam 