Underwater Philippines: RED Hydrogen One / Gates Underwater Housing

The RED Hydrogen One smartphone is too novel for its own good, but I was able to use it to take some casual 3D (stereoscopic) underwater pictures by putting it in a Gates Underwater Housing, and lighting scenes with a pair of Gates GT14 lights. It’s difficult to use continuous lighting to light still photographs underwater, but the Gates GT14 lights are super bright (14,000 lumens each). 🙂

The resulting stereoscopic photos can be played back effectively on the Hydrogen One’s novel display (no, I won’t ever call it “holographic”), but that wasn’t my goal. I wanted to see what the pictures would look like in VR headsets. I put the images in a video timeline and used Adobe Premiere Pro’s “VR Plane to Sphere” effect to project them into the right projection (I had to do this separately for left and right eyes), and the results actually look decent!

Check out the video in a VR headset, if you have one:

• “Save to VR” to watch in Oculus VR headsets
• “Save” to a playlist to find the video in YouTube VR

If this sort of setup didn’t cost many thousands of dollars, it could be a great little setup for VR enthusiasts.

The video from the Hydrogen One was useless, as the phone hunted around so quickly for focus that the resulting footage looks like it’s vibrating.

Shot in Dumaguete, Philippines, in December 2019. Special thanks to John Ellerbrock / Gates Underwater Products and Ron Lagerlof for the loan of the gear, and to Marty Snyderman and Howard / Michele Hall for the excuse to go there to celebrate. 

See all of Eric’s VR videos over at Oculus Media Studio.