Canon’s Latest Dual Fisheye Lens Lets You Shoot VR Compatible Videos

Canon’s latest product announcement has caught most people off-guard. Instead of a new camera or a traditional lens, its newly revealed product is a dual fisheye lens that allows you to shoot content specially viewed on VR or AR headsets.

Known as the RF5.2mm F2.8 L Dual Fisheye, the new lens is designed to be used together with Canon’s high-end mirrorless cameras such as the EOS R5 – taking advantage of their large CMOS sensors to capture and deliver high quality content. Undeniably, its design may seem unusual for most users – featuring two bulging fisheye lenses on a flat surface that is attached to an RF mount connector. When attached to a compatible EOS camera, it does give you an impression that your camera either has a new pair of eyes or, amusingly, a snout.

But as bizarre as it looks, the whole point of its design is to enable your camera to capture up to 190-degree stereoscopic high resolution 3D footage or photos, while at the same time giving them a perception of depth. Other than that, Canon says it features coatings to control flare and ghosting, a F.28 to F16 aperture range, as well as dust and water resistant sealing.

Oh, and the Dual Fisheye is manual-only, by the way. Much like most lenses, it features a ring that adjusts the focus on both lenses simultaneously. There’s also an Allen screw adjustment that enables you to calibrate the focus on one lens if required.

Canon also announced a forthcoming firmware update for compatible cameras which would enable them to support the lens and the company’s new EOS VR system. Included in the update are new features such as MF (manual focus) peaking and Magic Window UI that aids users to customise their footage or photos for different types of VR/AR headsets.

Concurrently, new EOS VR Utility and EOS VR Plugin applications have also been introduced. These allow users to edit footage captured with the Dual Fisheye with a variety of tools for customising its resolution output and export format (DPX, Pro Res, H264, etc.). Last but not least, Canon will release an EOS VR plugin for Adobe Premiere as well.

The new Canon RF5.2mm F2.8 L Dual Fisheye is slated to be released in select markets in late December 2021 and will retail at US$1,999 (RM8,362). The company has yet to announce whether the lens will be making its way to Malaysia in the foreseeable future.

YouTube Will Let You Resume Unfinished Mobile Videos On Desktop

YouTube quietly launched a new feature that lets you resume watching videos from your phone to your desktop. “Continue watching” will appear in the form of a mini-player when you pause an unfinished video from your mobile app.

The mini-player will appear on the bottom right corner and will queue the video just a second or so before you paused on the mobile app. You can click the play button to continue watching in the shrunken view or click anywhere on the mini-player itself to expand and open up the video in full.

9to5google reports that the feature works for both Android and iOS, and is even effective when handing off from an Android TV to the desktop site. However, the continuity apparently only works one-way, as the mobile apps cannot resume videos from your computer.

For this to be enabled, both platforms must be logged into the same account in order for the history to be synced. YouTube seems to be trickling out the feature though, as only a handful of people have been able to access it. While you’re waiting for Continue Watching to be released in full, you’ll be happy to know that the premium background playback feature will be coming to all mobile users starting from November.

Twitter Testing New Edge-To-Edge Layout For Photos And Videos On iOS

Twitter recently revealed that it is testing a new layout on its iOS app for tweets containing photos and videos. Posts such as these will now fill up the entire width of the screen to give more focus on media content shared by the platform’s community.

From the demonstration video provided, it is quite clear that Twitter has drawn inspiration for this new layout from social media rival Instagram. In fact, these posts do bear a strong resemblance to the Facebook-owned photo sharing platform’s layout – difference being the inclusion of Twitter’s familiar reply, retweet, like and share buttons below the images or videos, and the occasional text-only tweets scattered in between while scrolling through.

This test is the latest from the company as part of its efforts to address various complaints regarding its multimedia content supported tweets throughout the years. These include poor compression that drops the quality of uploaded photos, and the forced cropping of images (which also has controversies of its own) in order to fit within Twitter’s then-existing layout. Since then, the platform has been tweaking its interface to allow for full-sized images and adding high resolution content support up to 4K.

However, not all users are keen on this new edge-to-edge approach. According to The Verge, those who have access to the new layout have complained that it is too “in your face” for their liking and is also “headache-inducing”, while others have made inevitable comparisons of the new format with Twitter’s rivals – namely Facebook and Instagram.

If you’ve not noticed the new layout on the platform’s iOS app yet, that is because Twitter has only rolled out the update to a small number of testers at this time. So far, there’s no mention of when the platform is planning to have the updated interface to other users on Apple’s platform, or even to those on the Android version of the app.

Twitter Testing New Feature That Enables YouTube Videos To Be Played In-App On iOS

When not busy pondering whether politicians should be subject to the same rules as regular users, Twitter is actively developing new features and improvements for its platform. Just recently, the social media company has announced that it is currently testing a way to watch YouTube videos directly in your timeline.

But before you celebrate, it is worth noting that the feature is only being tested on the platform’s iOS app. Furthermore, much like the previously announced ability to share full-sized images, the new feature is only rolled out to a small group of users and is not made available to the public at this time.

This new ability to embed or watch YouTube videos on Twitter is a quality-of-life feature that has been a long time coming. Currently, videos that are shared on the platform will appear as thumbnails that links you to YouTube instead – an approach that is still maintained on rival social media platform Facebook.

As seen from the example shown above, tweets featuring these videos will come with a YouTube logo situated beneath the embedded player. Like the regular videos that are uploaded to Twitter, it appears that YouTube videos can also be set to be played either automatically or manually by the user.

Twitter has yet to reveal when it is planning to fully roll out this new feature to all of its users. Similarly, it is not known if the test will be expanded to Android users as well in the near future.

YouTube Has Taken Down Over 500,000 COVID-19 Misinformation Videos

YouTube has removed over 500,000 videos containing false or misleading information about COVID-19 since February last year, said its CEO Susan Wojcicki in a recent update addressed to YouTube content creators. Like many other tech companies, YouTube has been trying to showcase its efforts against falsehoods even as the platform has become a repository for COVID theories that range from doubtful to the absurdly wild.

“We’ve updated our policies to remove egregious medical misinformation about COVID-19 to prohibit things like saying the virus is a hoax or promoting medically unsubstantiated cures in place of seeking treatment,” wrote Wojcicki. She also said the company is now reaching out to its countless content creators to help spread accurate and up-to-date information about the vaccines.

YouTube has an official policy document explaining what considers as COVID misinformation. And that document can be described as both amusing and depressing – given that it’s a window into the sort of nonsense people are uploading to the platform.

Among the examples listed of content not allowed on YouTube are: “claims that COVID-19 is caused by radiation from 5G networks” and “claims that the COVID-19 vaccine will contain a microchip or tracking device.” But the best of all is this: “videos alleging that if you avoid Asian food, you won’t get the coronavirus” – that’s clearly why COVID numbers in Malaysia are on the rise (we’re being sarcastic, of course).

This all isn’t to detract from the scale of the problem that YouTube is wrestling with. Last year, a study published by BMJ Global Health found that over a quarter of the most-viewed English YouTube videos on COVID-19 gave out misleading or false information. The problem has probably gotten a lot worse since then.