I’ve been thinking about this more and due to the CPU of the Raspberry Pi, I think that the THETA V’s internal Android OS and Snapdragon 625 is going to be much higher performance. You’ll soon be able to write your own plug-ins for the THETA V that can access the streaming capability directly, potentially eliminating the need for a separate device to relay the 4K stream to YouTube or Facebook or other service.
With the internal plug-in, the Android OS inside the THETA V accesses the spherical cameras of the THETA V using the normal Android camera API.
The new Raspberry Pi 3 B+ has a Broadcom BCM2837B0 that runs at 1.4GHz, quad core, 1 GB LPDDR2 RAM.
The Snapdragon 625 inside of the THETA V has eight cores, Cortex A53, with speeds up to 2GHz, and an Adreno 506GPU. The THETA V also has 3GB of LPDDR3 SDRAM.
While I still plan on experimenting with the Raspberry Pi for educational purposes, it seems like the plug-in might be a better path toward getting something usable. The Raspberry Pi is also easier to experiment on because I have a monitor and keyboard connected to it, but it just doesn’t have the same power as the THETA V and the THETA V is directly connected to the integrated cameras.
BTW, I decided to install Android 7.1 x86 into a VirtualBox VM for testing. It’s running significantly smoother and faster in the VM compared to natively on the Raspberry Pi 3. Sound also works in the VM and things like YouTube function as you would normally expect on a regular Android device. If I have time, I’ll try and experiment with the UVC 1.5 driver inside of the VM first as it is easier to work on.
Ultimately, I want to focus more on Android development directly on the THETA V, but running Android in a VM is a good step for personal education.
Although I could just use the Android SDK HAXM emulator for Android development, I am enjoying the large screen of my Android desktop in the VM and the smooth workflow to use the keyboard and mouse as my primary way to work with Android. Last night, I also learned some nice techniques to use alsa_aplay tools to test my sound card from inside of Android.
I have the Google Play Store and all the apps running inside of Android in the VM.