After a bit of research trying to find available 360 cameras for telepresence in robotic applications, I have found that the Theta 360 Z1 might be the best suited.
I have seen the guides on how to setup live streams with ethernet/USB cables (charging while streaming), and think I can manage to set this up.
One concern I do have however, is that these cameras are not “industrial” in the sense that no GPIO’s seems available. Do I need every time to manually turn the camera on, push the buttons to get it into the correct modes, etc.?
The camera will mounted on a not-easy-to-reach position, so having to provide manual input is no good.
Is there a way to get the camera to boot when power is presented, and go into the correct mode and start the streaming?
Jh, @Jesper89 , you may consider using the live streaming plugin I’m working on. Will be able to start and stop remotelly live streaming from web anywhere. It uses wifi connection and depending on environment condition/heat, it can stream for hours. Direct exposure to sun at summertime is an issue for wired and wireless connection and streaming. Another advantage of my plugin is that it can stream to rtmp rts servers in both h264 and h265 encoding. I built a tiny atachable cooler too for some enviroments.
Ethernet no longer works? I thought this was an advertised feature of the Theta 360 cams. I need the stream to be as real-time as possible, so going Wi-Fi to remote PC to another Wi-Fi to a local PC may not be a very viable option.
What alternatives do we have here? I haven’t been able to find other 360 cameras that can do this.
@Jesper89 ,
I do not completely understand your needs, but why do you think it’s required to stream to a remote PC and then to another PC?
My plugin supports SRT protocol too(which is very close to WebRTC in latency), there is a srt mini server, which you could install on PC which is on the same local network and set camera plugin to stream to it.
I just started to finalize functionality to be able to start remotely live stream, etc. There will be only 1 viewer of the stream?
So the usecase would be to have the camera on a remote setup where it would connect to a remote “local” network. Then I would - from another location - be able to connect to this network and grab the stream to visualize the remote 360 data using VR goggles. Does this makes sense?
I’m trying to understand your original plan first.
z1 connecting through ethernet to a local network, plugged into a PC and using a software you would stream to which destination, what kind of media server to distribute the stream, which protocol were you planning to use initially?
to view the live stream you were planning to use VR goggles connected to a PC on a remote location, right? But how which software were you planning to use to view the stream? I’m not familiar with VR goggles, but they can also view the stream in a browser, isn’t it? Like YouTube or direct web view too?
I will work in near future to implement WebRTC directly in plugin for Z1, but I’m not there yet.
