So I needed an HD adapter in order to use both my HDTV monitor and the Oculus Rift at the same time (geek world problems), so I swung through Best Buy on my way home on Friday.

And I ended up walking out with a new 360° camera.

I guess their packaging team was going for “pixelated suppository.”

And I’ll tell you, it certainly wasn’t easy to set up.

First, in order to take a photo you must use the cell phone app, which makes sense I guess given that you don’t want half of your picture taken up by someone looking through a viewfinder.
Thing is, the damn camera couldn’t decide whether it wanted to connect to my phone via BlueTooth or wi-fi, so it simply didn’t do either.  It took me almost an hour of repeatedly connecting the two to eventually get them to play nicely.  And it was a magical connection, by the way…  Meaning I didn’t do anything differently, they just randomly decided to connect.

So now I’ve taken a few 360° pictures and videos.  And they’re fine.  Interesting even.  I’m not too thrilled about how wide/distorted my gut looks in some of them.  But that’s not enough to stop me from sharing them.

As soon as I figure out how to share/upload them.

See, I uploaded a test pic of Daphne’s playpen to Facebook on Saturday but it ended up looking like a distorted sphere instead of a 360° photo, so I deleted it.

Then I used a function in the app to save the videos locally, but have no idea where they were saved.

And now I’ve tried to send the same photo to myself via Gmail and the app hasn’t sent a single one.  (It’s actually given up attempting to send them, and is now just crashing when I try to send them.)

So for anyone who’s interested in 360 photography, you might want to wait a bit.

It’s still a little choppy out there.

j.s.