Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony

BARCELONA, Spain—While Samsung may have been first to the (consumer) market with its Galaxy Gear VR headset, it's safe to say that compelling content is still thin on the ground. The company hopes to change that with the Galaxy Gear 360, a camera born out of Samsung's "Project Beyond" that captures spherical video and images for playback in VR or in 2D via an Android app. It's due for release in Q2 of this year in "select countries."

The Gear 360 is a small (just shy of a baseball), sphere-shaped camera weighing at 153 grams that sports two fisheye lenses hooked up to two 15-megapixel CMOS sensors, which work together to capture 3840x1920 360-degree video, or 30-megapixel still images. There's also an option to film 180-degree wide-angle video by using just one of the lenses. Both lenses offer a relatively fast F/2.0 aperture, which should help in low light, particularly given the small sensor size.

Naturally, the Gear 360 is splash-proof and dust resistant—rated at IP53—for capturing all those extreme sports moments without the need to strap a bunch of GoPros to your head. Indeed, with GoPro not having had the best year in 2015, Samsung's primed to snap up some market share.

There's also a small 0.5-inch PMOLED display onboard (likely for menu selection only), a tripod mount, an accelerometer, gyroscope, up to AC Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, Bluetooth 4.1, and USB 2.0. There's no word on price yet, but we'll see if we can wrangle something out of Samsung while we check out the camera on the MWC show floor.

Samsung broke out the big guns for the Gear 360 reveal, with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg taking the stage to reveal that more than 1 million hours of video have been watched in Gear VR. Zuckerberg also announced that Facebook will be bringing its dynamic streaming technology—which compresses 360-degree video-on-the-fly—to the Gear 360, depending on where the user is looking.