Wednesday 19th February 2014

Harris and Hamilton 360-degree drift-off

Amazing 360-degree camerawork will make your head spin - enjoy!

---

Chris recently blogged about meeting Lewis Hamilton at Silverstone and enjoying a bit of a cheeky drift-off in two E63 AMG estates. Cool story in itself but what were they actually doing there? Well, Mercedes was filming a nifty 360-degree movie of its new 2014 F1 car (now available in the iPad App Store - search 'F1 360') and Chris was along to watch what was going on.

'Fancy a quick blast Lewis?' Go on then...

Ever the opportunist he saw a chance to go drifting with Hamilton and you know what happened next. Better than that, you can now SEE what happened next and from any angle you choose to. The technology that did this required, according to our Mercedes PR man, six cameras shooting at 40fps and 'a computer as big as an E63 Estate' but it's best not to think about that and instead enjoy a bit of guilt-free hooning that cost Mercedes three sets of tyres and proved to Chris that, yes, F1 drivers can drift.

There are two vids below - the first is exclusive footage of Chris's warm-up session, the second is his paired run with Hamilton leading in the white car. Move your mouse around to vary the view though, be warned, some of the angles might make you feel a bit queasy!

Enjoy!

Harris warms up

Harris and Hamilton

[Busso GTA]

Impressive tech

[Jibberingloon]

I want one of those camera setups!!!!!!!



Great Tech

[mark387mw]

Bad tech on my iPhone and nothing on app search - can't see it here.
Will try again on a PC tomorrow.

[Mr Noble]

Doesn't seem to work on ipad either.

Link takes you to App Store and opens a window, but then just freezes.

[Zammy]

Enjoyed that....great cameras, works best on lappy though.

[isherdholi]

Works perfectly fine on PC, and looks awesome.

I was going to have a quick cheeky dig at Apple products, but in all fairness, it probably won't work on my Android either, so I will keep quiet

[dapearson]

I want one of those cameras on my race car!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Beefmeister]

Holy cow that's some seriously cool tech.

[Dave Hedgehog]

bloody brilliant

i wonder what rear tyres ever did to upset AMG so much


you can follow them as they get in the car lol

Edited by Dave Hedgehog on Wednesday 19th February 09:29

[Ston]

Wow, very clever...

[e21Mark]

Clever tech. (I got lost and a little bored of it half way through though tbh)

[The Stiglet]

I thought Hamilton would've been all sideways but Harris FTW! Guess it's quite hard to make a racing driver slower

[Boatbuoy]

I was talking to a student from the filmmaking course at Bournemouth Uni this summer, he turned up on the promenade on his nice retro Vespa with a pole mounted on it, on top of which was this:



Intrigued (I was flying my Phantom Quadcopter with one GoPro on it at the time), I got talking to him. He explained the 360 degree video concept. Basically you set them all off recording at the same time, then later you run all six videos through a piece of software that stiches them all together. Simples!

Suddenly I need another 5 GoPro's!!!

[garypotter]

Great tech but lost interest after 10 secs, will this be a sky F1 camera angle that viewers can play with in the near future? (I was going to say BBC but they do not want F1)

[Madkat]

What kinda Voodoo magic is this!!!!????

Is it just me or was the Monkey doing better drifts (bigger yaw angles) than the F1 driver? Although Hamilton was gathering up the end of the slides near perfectly hardly any tank slapping as far as i could see. His last drift had a Scandinavian flick!

Edited by Madkat on Wednesday 19th February 10:03

[anonymous-user]

Won't play on ipad.

[eybic]

The app is for iPad only so won't show on an iPhone app store search.

[Deisel Weisel]

Unwatchable on my PC in both HD and SD. Very slow and jerky. (2.2ghz dual-core, 3gb ram, W7 Aero switched off)

[lockup]

Deisel Weisel said:

Unwatchable on my PC in both HD and SD. Very slow and jerky. (2.2ghz dual-core, 3gb ram, W7 Aero switched off)

More likely you can't stream enough data down your network connection.

[lufbramatt]

Very cool

Silky smooth here. Although I am using an 8-core, 3.4GHz CAD workstation