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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 tripod. Load your videos onto a Samsung phone, 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 smartphone 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.
