SlopeViews @ Birds of Prey

Careful observers might have noticed 360° video cameras all over the television last weekend. Immersive Media had cameras at both the MTVu Woodie Awards and Hockey Night In Canada on Friday night. Immersive Media’s new agent, SlopeViews, lived up to their name at the Birds of Prey World Cup Ski Race event at Beaver Creek Ski Resort. I’ll be posting about each of these projects in 360° video this week, but today, I want to discuss SlopeViews.

Focused on destination resort marketing, SlopeViews is a relatively new arrival on the 360° video scene, but they have hit the ground running on a number of projects. The Birds of Prey Ski Race was an opportunity to showcase their capabilities to the snow sports industry that is gearing up for the Winter Olympics in February.

James Hay, SlopeViews CEO, tells me that they captured some amazing imagery that will bring audiences all of the energy of the event. They shot the initial build up and transformation of Beaver Creek Ski Resort, who already has some fantastic 360° video virtual tours on their website, into a World Cup venue. The Vail Valley Foundation has the time-lapse piece from the building of the Finish Stadium here and will be featuring more content in days to come.


We can look forward to seeing athlete interviews, fan rowdiness, and much more from the Birds of Prey via the SlopeViews 360° video camera and their crew of Immersive Media Producers. With backgrounds in adventure sports, media, and travel industry marketing, the SlopeViews’ team is ideally suited to bring clients and their prospective visitors the ultimate experience of a destination online and, finally, fulfill the promise of the term “virtual tour”.

And here are some photos that SlopeViews provided via their active Facebook page.

yellowBird Captures T-Mobile Sing-Along 360° Video Experience

A couple of days ago, Tech Crunch had a piece about yellowBird, the Dutch startup employing LadyBug 2 cameras from Point Grey Research. Glad to see so many comments in favor of the 360° video platform, I chimed in on the discussion and mentioned that I had not seen much from yellowBird since it's initial demo was released last January. Well, thanks to another commenter, I was pointed to T-Mobile's Sing-Along 360° Experience. This is just good fun.

Apparently, the team at yellowBird were invited to Trafalgar Square by Saatchi & Saatchi London to shoot this T-Mobile brand-affirming event. 13,000 people gathered to sing Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" in front of a larger video display of they lyrics. This sort of branded flash mob sing-along has been quite popular with the people in attendance, on YouTube, and with T-Mobile as a way to connect with customers with little fun. It's great to see a company like T-Mobile wanting to take the concept still further. By documenting the event in 360° video, they gave the rest of us the opportunity to see and hear what it was like in the crowd.

It's also great to see a renowned creative team like Saatchi & Saatchi continue to bring 360° video to its clients. Saatchi & Saatchi teamed up with Immersive Media earlier this year on it's work with Armani Jeans in a guided 360° video brand experience for its new website.

Congrats to yellowBird on garnering significant attention for their work with 360° video. Apparently, the TechCrunch article (spread widely on Twitter) drew enough interest to overload their servers this week, those are growing pains that I'm sure they are happy to deal with. Here's the video that got people talking.

You can also experience a hot-air balloon ride with yellowBird's founders over the Dutch country-side while they interview for a TV news program here
Here's a photo from the Trafalgar Square event