VideoLAN’s extremely popular VLC media player, which is capable of playing virtually any format on almost any platform, recently released a technical preview of the player’s next capability: 360-degree video.

To make 360-degree video formats available on VLC player, VideoLAN teamed up with San Francisco-based Giroptic Inc., which makes a 2K video, 4K photo-capable virtual reality camera named the 360cam. Giroptic provided samples, cameras, code and expertise to VideoLAN’s team as part of this partnership.

This new capability will arrive with VLC 3.0 and provide for playback of 360-degree videos following the Spatial Video spec, 360-degree photos and panoramas following the Spherical spec, display modes including zoom, Little Planet and reverse Little Planet. These features are open-source, fully cross-platform and accelerated with OpenGL and Direct3D11. The technical preview is available for download from VideoLAN’s website for Windows 7 (and later) as well as for MacOS 10.10 (and later).

In the full release, 360 features will become available for Android, iOS, and Xbox One. Mobile versions of 360 support will make use of phone sensors to provide navigation. VLC plans to support VR headsets such as Vive, Daydream, Oculus and OSVR in 2017. The media player will also receive 3D audio playback support, including for head tracking headphones in the future.

VLC media player is currently in version 2.2.4 and is available for almost every platform in its stable version. Developers interested in the source code for VLC can download and compile directly. The media player is part of a broad suite of media tools and libraries also available for developers to try out provided by VideoLAN.

Users can expect VLC version 3.0 to arrive sometime around the end of the month.