The SamsungVR API Introduction

Did you know that you can create a custom application to interface with SamsungVR?

Formerly called MilkVR, the newly named SamsungVR service allows for sending 360° videos to Samsung's high quality transcoding service for playback on virtually every type of headset and system capable of playing these videos.

There are several steps you need to take to enable uploading these videos from your own mobile app or other system.

Get the SDK

If you are working on an Android application that wants to upload 360°, or spherical video, you will want to start with downloading the SDK.

Let's download it from Github: https://github.com/SamsungVR/android_upload_sdk

Follow the instructions on the readme to get the api setup.

Now, you will need a key to access the SamsungVR api endpoints.

Get an API key

There is no official documentation up right now for creating an API key, but it is a really easy process if you don't mind firing up the command line on a Mac or Linux based machine.

key pieces you will need to adjust:

Your email: if the email account you use for SamsungVR is bob@gmail.com , it would be set as bob%40gmail.com . You would need to make all characters in your email and password escaped for curl to send them properly.

(There are several tools to encode, and you can easily find them on the internet by searching for encodeURIComponent on the web.)

Your password: do the same with your password.

Your application's name: set your application's name instead of YourAppName in the example. Be sure that you don't have any special characters that need to be escaped.

Now, let's try this thing out.

You will note that the login command uses a normal http form, while the API key creation uses JSON encoding of the POST data. This is a somewhat inconsistent part of the SamsungVR api, so you will have to be careful with your data types.

Result

You should receive a result back with a single json result containing your app key.

Some advanced API key creation settings

There is currently no way to modify an app key once created, so you need to create a new key to change any settings.

Several optional parameters can be set right now. These are:

camera_brand - used to set the name of your company, if your app is for a single 360 camera

- used to set the name of your company, if your app is for a single 360 camera camera_model - Set the model name for your camera that uses this app key.

Where do we go from here

Overall, there are some powerful features under the hood, but the upload framework is currently very much in an experimental state.

So, share your comments, tweet at me, and most importantly, let's create some amazing content that takes people where they have never been before!

Posted by Marshall on 2016-08-01.