Yanko Design - Form Beyond Function

Sonicam Makes You the Spielberg of VR

Posted: 23 Jun 2017 06:00 PM PDT

As we prepare to enter the age of immersive VR (Facebook, Google, YouTube, Samsung, and HTC are all highly invested in it), the true difference between any 360° video and a great Virtual Reality experience is the way you capture it. The first thing we think of when it comes to virtual reality is the 360° video… however, that’s just half the story. Video and audio work in sync to make life (real and virtual) believable. So while you’re experiencing 360° video, you should ideally be experiencing 360° audio too. The Sonicam is designed to do just that. It captures incredibly high definition 4K video as well as audio in a complete 360 format, creating videos that are much more immersive and believable.

Sonicam does VR right by being a camera that treats video as well as audio with equal importance. On its spherical body rest 9 fish-eye lenses that capture a complete video map around the sides and the top. They come coated with a special coating that allows them to stay pristine clear and resist scratches of any sort. The camera also comes with an array of 64 high dynamic range microphones that pick up audio in the finest detail. All this hardware power pushes the Sonicam to have a spherical metal body, allowing it to dissipate heat easily and film like a breeze. Speaking of ‘like a breeze’, the Sonicam comes with just 3 controls, a power button, a wi-fi button, and obviously a record button. You can access further controls on Sonicam’s app and even view your 3D content directly on your phone right within the app.

With the Sonicam you can expect film-grade 360° video as well as audio. Unlike the 360 rigs and mounts for GoPros that allow you to mount multiple cameras on it and capture content, the Sonicam comes ready with 9 lenses designed for wide-angle capturing. The Sonicam even saves incredible amounts of time and money by performing the image stitching internally to give you a seamless 360° spherical video, rather than having to hire a VR editor to stitch footage together manually from multiple GoPro cameras (anyone who has experience in this field knows how time consuming and expensive VR post-production is). Not just that, it even calibrates the audio from its multiple microphone layout to match to your VR view so that sounds turn loud and soft depending on where you look… the hallmark of a truly immersive VR experience. The Sonicam is a perfect future-tool for film-makers looking to migrate effectively to VR filming, or even enthusiasts looking to easily create great VR content at the push of a button. Its simple controls allow you to capture events and occasions like sports games, weddings, travel-vlogs, and even podcasts in a rather new and breath-taking format literally with the push of one button. With its incredibly advanced yet simple setup, your 360° video and audio will definitely be a ‘cut’ above the rest. Expect a lot of VR-headset-mounted standing ovations!

Designer: SONICAM

BUY NOW: $2599 $3999

BUY NOW: $2599 $3999

Putting the Excellence in X-Lens!

Posted: 23 Jun 2017 02:00 PM PDT

Designed as a powerful and more competent, and definitely more vibrant upgrade to the Xlens phone camera lens, the Xlens Pro push the boundaries of mobile photography even more.

The aesthetic of the X-Lens Pro definitely looks professional with its full metal body and rather advanced screw-based vice mounting system. The new range of lenses include a Macro 20x as well as a telephoto 2x, alongside the wide angle and the fish-eye lenses, pretty much giving you the capabilities of a high-end phone camera on any device. We even love the name X-Lens, because it sounds like excellence, which is what these lenses hope to help you achieve.

The lenses are designed to fit comfortably over not just the phone camera, but even laptop webcams. However, the most stand-out feature of the X-Lens Pro has to be its color treatment. While providing the regular anodized metal, gold, and black finishes, we’re simply loving the electric pink option that just looks like an amped-up version of the Rose Gold (which I think has completed its course and should be retired now). The electric pink by a large measure looks like the best colored option among the 4. Kinda cool since today’s coincidentally National Pink Day. I’d wager a guess that the vibrant pink hue would help get people to look into the camera lens more often too!

Designer: Damon Lin (Momax)