Shoot Your Own VR Masterpieces With These 360 Cameras

Don't just rely on Hollywood to tackle VR. Create your own headset masterpiece with these cameras that shoot videos and photos in 360 degrees.
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James Day

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Don’t just rely on Hollywood to tackle VR. Create your own headset masterpiece with these cameras that shoot videos and photos in 360 degrees.

1. Samsung Gear 360 | $TBD

Interrogation droid or VR camera? Both! Just kidding, it’s a camera. The Gear 360 has two fish-eye lenses that gobble up the scene in 4K video or 30-megapixel panoptic stills. Use the mount on the bottom to fasten it to a helmet or a tripods. Load your videos onto a Samsung phones, and plop that into a Gear VR.

2. Ricoh Theta S | $350

Not all 360 cameras are tiny globes. Ricoh’s rig is as long as a smartphones but narrower, with a fish-eye lens on each flat side to capture 360-degree photos and HD video. Connected to a computer, it can livestream spherical videos. A slow-shutter feature lets you grab 5K whole-sky nighttime stills of the stars.

3. 360Fly 4K | $499

The distinctive feature of this waterproof action camera is its single skyward-facing, ultrawide-angle lens. It captures everything around and above you (but not below) in gripping 4K. The included mounts can grasp a surfboard, bike handlebar, or whatever other extreme conveyance you’re getting gnarly on.