If you ask anyone for their media player of choice, the answer is usually the free and open source cross-platform multimedia player, VLC Media Player. Sorry Windows Media Player, your reign has come to a close. It’s a lightweight program that can playback a wide plethora of different formats and codecs, making it the ideal application to have on your smartphone or laptop. And now, the program has added another feature: support for 360-degree video playback to its desktop versions.
VLC Media Player is the product of Videolan, a non-profit organisation behind the development of the media player as an open source project. The organisation has teamed up with VR camera developer Giroptic to add 360-degree video support to VLC.
“VLC is one of the video players most widely used in the world. This will allow the millions of users to take full advantage of a promising new technology and be widely involved in its democratization.”
– Richard Ollier, co-founder and CEO of Giroptic.
Don’t worry, the smartphone apps will also get 360-degree support sometime in the future. Furthermore, the new upgrades aren’t only relegated to smartphones and PC versions of the application, dedicated VLC versions for virtual reality (VR) headsets like the Oculus Rift and Google Daydream will also be added next year as well.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf, one of the lead developers behind VLC, stated that his team had already begun to work on spatial 3D audio necessary for implementing the application on VR headsets. VLC will likely be available for Android-based VR devices like Google’s Daydream VR first and then come to Windows-based devices like the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift.
