We’ve all seen kiteboarding videos shot from a head mounted camera, which offer a first person view from home. Now, thanks to a great new contraption and some fancy video editing, you can pan around, look up down and any way you like while riding around the Hood River, Oregon with Brandon Scheid and Jason Slezak.

The company is appropriately 360 Labs and what they do, is mount six GoPro cameras into a cube. For those of you mathematically minded, that’s one on each side of the cube. So between the near 180 degree viewing angles on each camera they manage to capture pretty much everything around the subject. Oh, with the help of an extender pole of course! The neat little mount isn’t commercially available, but even if you had the footage it would take some pretty nifty tricks with Windows Movie Maker to edit it into this.

We played an interesting experiment on some friends, where we sat them down in front of the player and watched where they looked. As kiteboarders, we found ourselves looking at the view around, other kiteboarders and behind at the wake. The non-kiteboarders, spent most of their time looking at the equipment. How the rider moved the bar, what the kite was doing and then down at the board.

Give it a try on someone you know, see what they look at!

Check out the 360 degree, First Person experience of kiteboarding here, and while you’re playing, think about this:

Could this be the beginning of virtual reality kiteboarding? Where you can practice your backrolls from the comfort of your lounge room. Try doing a backroll with the player above, it’s not far off!

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