Touching the Sky is an hour-long 3D 360\u00b0 experience from Red Bull and Meta, available for free on Meta Quest TV.<\/p>\n
360\u00b0 and 180\u00b0 video is far from new. It was the primary focus of early mobile VR in the 2010s, yet it was often lackluster due to low-resolution and low-bitrate implementations. A decade later, Apple has revived public and industry interest in 180\u00b0 3D video with Apple Vision Pro, by pushing the image quality and motion clarity to deliver a premium immersive video experience. It’s arguable that this led to the partnership between Meta and James Cameron<\/a>, aiming to compete, and to Meta “courting” Disney and A24<\/a>.<\/p>\n What’s been somewhat lost in the new hype wave, however, is discussion of 360\u00b0 video. There are good reasons for that. 360\u00b0 is inherently a lot less practical to shoot than 180\u00b0, since the viewer can see in all directions. It also cuts the angular resolution in half, meaning even the best 360\u00b0 will look far less sharp than the best 180\u00b0.<\/p>\n But despite those tradeoffs, 360\u00b0 video offers a level of immersion that 180\u00b0 simply can’t. 180\u00b0 3D video gives you a huge window into another place, but the black edges are visible any time you turn your head. Only 360\u00b0 3D feels like being there.<\/p>\n All this is why Red Bull and Meta’s new Touching the Sky documentary is particularly interesting. While inherently less sharp than 180\u00b0, it’s higher quality than almost any 360\u00b0 3D video I’ve watched to date, and seeing footage in every direction I look reminds me of what’s lost with 180\u00b0.<\/p>\n In fact, Touching the Sky so strongly leans into the format that it starts by recommending you watch it in a swivel chair. In reality this is a requirement, not just a recommendation, as the angle to the subjects you’re supposed to be watching shifts between scenes.<\/p>\n The hour-long video has you soar through the Alps and the Karakoram Himalaya with professional Red Bull paragliding, wingsuit, speed riding, and BASE jumping athletes, covering almost the full spectrum of passive human flight.<\/p>\n Produced by veteran mountain sports photographer Jonathan Griffith, Meta says it took 3 years to make, including 2 years of preproduction and 1 year of filming. That preproduction included building custom capture rigs, a tandem paraglider, and a custom drone setup.<\/p>\n Behind the scenes of Touching the Sky.<\/p>\n Touching the Sky is exclusively available in the Meta Quest TV app on Horizon OS headsets, including Quest 3, Quest 3S, Quest Pro, and Quest 2.<\/p>\n I recommend manually setting the quality to ‘Best’, overriding ‘Auto’, to ensure you see it at full quality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Touching the Sky is an hour-long 3D 360\u00b0 experience from Red Bull and Meta, available for free on…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":110654,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[158,67,132,68,729,730],"class_list":{"0":"post-110653","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-virtual-reality","8":"tag-technology","9":"tag-united-states","10":"tag-unitedstates","11":"tag-us","12":"tag-virtual-reality","13":"tag-vr"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114954374292574062","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110653\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}