Facebook has built its own 360-degree stereoscopic 3D video camera.

The company calls this new device the Facebook Surround360, and this summer, it will give away both the camera's hardware designs and the complex software that weaves the camera's myriad images into one complete three-dimensional landscape. Yes, it will give them away—for free.

Built from off-the-shelf hardware worth roughly $30,000, this black circular camera—with its 17 evenly spaced lenses—looks kinda like the flying droid that descends onto the ice planet at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back (though it lacks those insect-like dangly legs). Drawing images from all 17 of those lenses, it produces 360-degree spherical video for viewing both inside virtual reality headsets like the Samsung Gear (stereoscopic 3D) and on ordinary smartphones, tablets, and PCs (monoscopic). Similar videos are already popping up in News Feeds on the Facebook social network.

You can think of these videos as a bridge to the kind of full-fledged virtual reality Facebook plans on offering through the Oculus Rift, the VR headset it released late last month. For now, the Oculus is primarily a way of playing games, but Facebook says the headset will eventually foster a new breed of communication and entertainment atop its social network. The Surround360 is an interim step on the way to this extreme virtual reality. "We care a lot about kickstarting and inspiring the overall ecosystem as much as we can," says Facebook chief product officer Chris Cox.

The new camera is part of a much wider industry push towards 360-degree video. Companies such as Ricoh sell relatively inexpensive cameras for consumers. Google, Nokia, and a startup called Jaunt have built more complex commercial devices akin to the Surround360. And Google is serving 360-degree video from YouTube. But Cox feels that Facebook has gone several steps further—not only with the design of the device, but with the decision to open source it. "We do not have ambitions of getting into the camera business," he says. "But we did observe that there wasn't really a great reference camera that took really nice, high-resolution, 3D, fully spherical video."

Immersive Video for Everyone

Competitors will likely take issue with this characterization. And it's worth noting that just the parts for the Surround360 cost about twice as much as the GoPro Odyssey, the 360-degree video rig that GoPro built in tandem with Google. But Facebook is pushing things in a new direction by adding three fish-eye lenses to the top and bottom of the Surround360, a means of producing those truly spherical images.

A fish-eye atop the camera captures what's above it, and two more on its underside capture what's below. There are two on the underside—and not just one—because the camera sits atop a pole fixed on a rolling stand, and with two lenses on either side of the pole, Facebook can remove it from the final spherical image-scape (though you still see the stand).

Facebook engineer Brian Cabral—the veteran of graphics hardware giant nVidia and camera company Lytro who led the small team that built the Surround360—says the aim was to create a camera that's not only capable of high-resolution spherical video but also durable and easy to use. The company saw a "hole" in the technology available on today's market, he explains, and worked to fill it in multiple ways.

"You can treat it like an ordinary camera," Cabral says of the Surround360. "You plug it in. You hit record. You get a big data file out. And it somehow gets turned into a seamless video, just like you would with any video camera." Facebook designed the hardware and the software, he explains, as a single system that performs a single task. The hope is that this will significantly reduce the time needed to prepare a video for public distribution.

'We do not have ambitions of getting into the camera business.' Chris Cox, Facebook

The more important point, however, is that Facebook has vowed to share the designs with the world at large. Cox says that come the summer, the company will share both the hardware schematics and the software on GitHub, the primary home for open source projects on the 'net. Facebook hopes that others will not only manufacture and sell the device but modify it in myriad ways—produce entirely new types of cameras from the basic designs.

It's a playbook Facebook has followed time and again. Five years ago, the company started open sourcing the designs for the computer servers and other data center gear it designed to help drive its massive online empire. Earlier this year, the company also said it would begin freely sharing all sorts of devices it has designed to improve and expand Internet access across the globe, including wireless antennas and even drones that can deliver broadband from the stratosphere. In every case, open source is ultimately an attempt to expand the reach and the scope of the Facebook social network—something that has often proven successful.

Entering the Third Dimension

Designing this kind of camera is no easy task. According to Koji Gardner, the vice president of hardware at Jaunt, the difficulty significantly increases when you move to the kind of stereoscopic 3D video meant for the Samsung Gear and the Oculus Rift. But despite the effort and the thought that went into the Surround360, Cabral and Cox repeatedly say that Facebook has no interest in actually selling the device or anything like it. The primary—and indeed the only—aim is to share the design with outside camera makers.

At the moment, the Surround360 is a camera for professionals and serious hobbyists. But because the device is open source, designers could transform it into a consumer device. And as Cox says, Facebook hopes that camera makers will grab bits and pieces from the company's design in an effort to solve whatever problems they are trying to solve with their own cameras. "With any good open source project, you don't always take the whole thing," Cox says. "Usually, there's a piece in there that solves a problem so that you don't have to go solve it." The kind of cheery picking is possible, Cabral explains, because the camera doesn't use custom parts. All the parts, he says, can be found on the Internet.

If people mine Facebook's project in this way, the end result is more 360-degree video—video that's probably posted to Facebook. The company is banking on video as the central medium that will power the future of its social network. So far, it has succeeded spectacularly in two dimensions. Now, with its new camera, Facebook is setting its sights on all three.