Bidirectional 360 Video And Why It Could Be Useful

What is bidirectional 360 video?

Bidirectional 360 video is video that can be played smoothly in either forward or backwards.  Due to how compression works for video, usually it cannot be played smoothly in reverse.

Why would bidirectional 360 video be useful?

Image that you create a 360 video while walking down a path.  If you could play it both forward and backwards, then you instantly have a little virtual reality path that you can walk back and forth in.  String a bunch of this bidirectional videos together and you could construct a whole virtual world you could walk around in.  Below is a little example of a single path.  Use the white arrows to walk back and forth.  The example will work best on the desktop, though it should work on mobile as well.

 Walk  back and forth  and look around and see if you can find the Tardis:

How to make bidirectional video:

You can make bidirectional with a few easy steps.  

• First take your video clip and reverse it.
• Concatenate the reversed clip with the original clip
• Then make a controller that knows where to jump to when you want to change directions

The logic for the controller is fairly simple.  because the first half of the video will going forward and the second half of the video is going backwards, whenever you want to change directions, you can simple do something like this:

var time = player.getDuration() - player.getCurrentTime();

player.seekTo(time,true);

This will jump to the exact place in the video that corresponds to going in the opposite direction of where you are currently in the video.