"GoPro's done a good job," 360fly's CEO Peter Adderton told Mashable. "They own the [action camera] space. No one owns the 360-degree video space."

Adderton, a serial entrepreneur and extreme sports fanatic, whose previous successes include founding the prepaid wireless network Boost Mobile, which he then sold to Sprint, thinks his company's tennis ball-sized 360fly camera could become the GoPro of 360-degree videos and help popularize virtual reality, not just for tech nerds, but for everyone.

First, a quick primer on 360-degree videos. What exactly are they? They're exactly what you think they are: Videos that you can manipulate in 360 degrees. Instead of a static and flat point of view, you can pan around the video and view it from different perspectives. Think of it as an interactive layer to videos.

Just about every tech company is working on 360-degree video support. Facebook's working on "spherical videos" for its News Feed and Google's been all over the concept: First by introduced 360-degree videos to YouTube earlier this year, then by announcing its Jump project — a high-tech rig that combines footage from 16 GoPros simultaneously.

Here's what a 360-degree video shot with the 360fly camera looks like (they're doing wheelies on motorcycles):

360-degree videos are fun to look at, but they're only one part of the video roadmap. Both Facebook and Google are banking on 360-degree videos to help propel virtual reality into the mainstream.

As with 4K, virtual reality's main hurdle isn't its hardware but it's impending lack of content. Sure, Sony's working on some virtual reality games for its Project Morpheus VR headset and there are tons of mind-bending demos for the Oculus Rift, but there needs to be a lot more — a shortcoming I realized when I reviewed the Samsung Gear VR.

But unlike traditional flat video formats, creating 360-degree videos and VR isn't easy and it's not cheap at all. To create high-quality 360-degree videos for VR, you need special camera rigs — ones with many lenses pointed in every direction.

Google's Jump camera uses 16 GoPros. GoPro's own cube-shaped VR camera rig, which will launch next year, houses six GoPros. Facebook's 360-degree videos will be shot with a special rig that uses 24 high-res cameras. The setups required to shoot VR aren't consumer-friendly; we're talking about at least $8,000 for Jump, $3,000 for GoPro's camera and maybe even northward of $10,000 for Facebook's camera. And we haven't even included a VR headset yet.

The 360fly camera will cost $399 when it launches in August. To watch the videos properly, you can buy Google Cardboard for just $5 and stick your own smartphone inside of it (Cardboard should also work with most of the other 360-degree video systems mentioned). Granted, the combo isn't going to come close to what you'll get from the Oculus Rift and a VR camera that costs thousands of dollars, but Adderton is betting it'll be enough of a gateway drug to get people hooked on 360-degree video and VR.

"The nearest virtual reality experience today would be six GoPros together and an Oculus Rift headset, which would roughly be around $4,000," Adderton said. "For $399 you get the same experience and you can actually make your own content."

The 360fly camera works with Google Cardboard to create an inexpensive VR experience.

360fly was birthed from Carnegie Mellon University's robotics lab. Although the company's been working on mainstreaming 360-degree videos since 2011 when it launched the GoPano Micro, a 360-degree lens attachment for the iPhone, its engineers have over 16 years of panoramic experience working with mirrors, lenses and software.

I remember reviewing the GoPano Micro when it came out. It was bold, but ultimately disappointing. The problem most panoramic videos run into is that the footage is stitched together from several different camera lenses, creating an unpolished and sloppy-looking video.

The 360fly has one lens that can look in all directions. It doesn't stitch anything. As a result, footage is seamless (albeit a little distorted when you adjust the viewing angle).

The 360fly camera is slightly smaller than a tennis ball. At the top of its geometrically shaped body is its camera lens, which looks very much like an eye. The lens has an f/2.5 aperture and records video at 1,504 x 1,504 resolution at 30 frames per second with 240-degrees of vertical view and 360-degrees of horizontal view.

The 1,600 milliamp-hour (mAh) battery is good for up to two hours of video recording, I'm told. It has built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 to connect to a smartphone.

As a type of action camera, the 360fly is also waterproof down to 16 feet and can operate at temperatures down to -4 degrees Fahrenheit and up to 250 degrees F.

Editing on the go

Capturing 360-degree video is only half of the equation, though. Editing and sharing your footage is the second half.

"We think that the UI is the smartphone is the holy grail," Adderton said. "You can edit everything on the camera without ever needing to touch your laptop."

There will still be laptop software for those who want more editing features, but the 360fly and its accompanying app is designed for instant gratification.

Videos recorded with the 360fly are edited with the the 360fly app. Image: 360fly

"My concern is that most people aren't going to take the time — they want to instantly share now," Adderton said. "They want to share a short form clip. The new generation has ADD. You've got 30 seconds to capture my attention, if you haven't caught my attention, I'm moving on."

I only got a peek at the smartphone app and editing process, but it looked simple enough. The camera streams a proxy file (one that's not full resolution) across to the smartphone app and displays the footage on a timeline for editing.

"If you start to move two hours of file footage onto your phone, your phone's dead, it's not gonna work," Adderton said. "I sat in my car and I took an hour worth of footage in my camera and I edited a two-minute video and shared to both Facebook and Instagram and any one of my social sites within five minutes."

I couldn't agree more with Adderton when he says that nobody wants to look through hours of footage. I probably have hundreds of GoPro videos that I've never looked at. My excuse for not looking at them is always, "I'll get to it later." But I never do.

Machine learning

Privacy concerns aside, machine learning (a.k.a. artificial intelligence) that allows a computer to process huge amounts of data and actually understand what it's sorting, is where video is headed. Google Photos and its ability to ID faces, sort and group objects and places, create GIFs from batches of photos, and create "stories" has shown how powerful this kind of AI can be.

"Where it really starts to get exciting for us is in the machine learning," Adderton said. "The camera is always on and it's always looking around, and it's capturing 360

all the time. We're spending a lot of time on sensor tuning."

"We're working with some of the helmet manufacturers to literally have you riding down the road and the camera is gonna literally look at a red light. It will look at the green light and it will look at the cars coming on the righthand side and it will quickly determine that car's not slowing down — we should give you a warning."

It's a lofty feat for an action camera, but Adderton was stoked to tell me more. In a video on his laptop, he showed me a guy who was walking around in a two-story building and the camera could track him as he moved left and right, up some stairs and behind a pole. Even with more people, the camera could track them all without getting confused. I was impressed but I'll need to test the tracking myself in the real-world before I'm convinced 100%.

"[It's] one camera in a two-story building; normally you need six or seven cameras to do this," Adderton explains. "So imagine if you're a police officer or a SWAT team — you can put the camera down in a mall and literally start to track everyone and tell the camera you're looking for a guy with a gun."

Lots more to come

360fly isn't stopping with the launch of its ball-shaped camera this summer. The company is already developing second- and third-generation models, ones with even higher resolution.

"We're also going to build a pro version of this; the pro version of this will really allow professional photographers to create virtual reality," Adderton said. "It's not gonna cost 5,000 dollars. It's gonna be way south of that. We're building a [version two] of this. V2 will be out sometime early next year. It will be 4K."

And just like GoPro, 360fly plans to work with media companies, brands and notable athletes such as RedBull and Monster to create an "influencer" network.

The 360fly camera is slightly smaller than a tennis ball. Image: Raymond Wong/Mashable

Adderton envisions events where attendees borrow 360fly cameras and then shoot their own 360-degree videos. Free Google Cardboards could be given out and fans could then edit and view their content immediately in VR.

The 360fly has a standard tripod nut mount on its bottom, but with GoPro owning the action camera space, it needs to play nice (at least for the time being) with its huge ecosystem of mounts and accessories.

"In order for us to really break down the barrier to entry of buying our camera, we've added an adapter that allows you to use all of your accessories from your GoPro, so you don't need to go out and buy a bunch of new accessories," Adderton said. "You can literally just snap them on and [you're] off and running."

It's still early days for 360-degree videos, 360-degree cameras and VR. GoPro didn't become the multimillion-dollar company it is today with its first action camera. It really wasn't until the Hero 2, Hero 3, the addition of Wi-Fi and the smartphone explosion that GoPro really became more than a niche camera company for extreme sports athletes.

As much of a skeptic of 360-videos and VR as I am, I feel like 360fly is onto something huge here. Maybe the first model won't land right, but if what Adderton told me about all the machine learning, object tracking and upcoming models is legit, then it sounds like the company's going to be well-positioned to be the GoPro of 360-degree video and VR.