BBC shoots 360-degree video of the LHC at CERN

The BBC has put the Large Hadron Collider at CERN on the French-Swiss border in a very different light by filming in 360 degrees inside the LHC maintenance tube itself. The project was part of BBC’s technology program Click.

But the BBC does not only film in the tube, something that initially still comes across as human, as witnessed by the wearer of the camera. When the film gets to the Compact Muon Solenoid or CMS detector, 360-degree video suddenly becomes extra impressive. After all, the viewer can now look around without a director or cameraman determining the viewing direction. The CMS detector is 15 meters in diameter and 21 meters long, something that often looks bad in photos.

To shoot the video, the BBC used six GoPro action cameras, one on each side of the cube. One of the trickiest problems the makers ran into was sticking the shots together properly due to the parallax problem. This is because each camera lens has a slightly different place where a subject enters the image. Think of an arm that comes out slightly different for one lens than where that arm comes in again with the other lens. Those images then have to be tied together. Despite the hard work to get all the errors out, the parallax effect could not be brushed off everywhere.

The video can be viewed via various channels, but for most YouTube will be the most user-friendly, whether or not at 4k 50fps and possibly with the help of Cardboard or other virtual reality glasses.

Source: BBC