How Insta360's Founder Thinks About Building Cameras for Everyday Side Hustles

The Camera That Started as a Phone Accessory

Ten years ago, if you wanted to shoot a 360-degree video, you had to explain why. Insta360's first camera, the Nano, plugged directly into an iPhone and felt more like a phone case than a serious tool. It was clunky, required a full workflow of shooting, transferring, and stitching, and then you still had to dig through that spherical footage to find the shot you actually wanted.

Fast forward to today, and the company's X series has become a go-to for skiers, bikers, and motorcyclists. But something unexpected happened along the way. After the X5 launched, Insta360 noticed a shift: more than half of their customers now buy a 360 camera not for sports, but for travel, graduation ceremonies, weddings, and capturing family life.

That shift is what drove the development of the X6. It's not just a spec bump—though the X6 does pack a custom 1/1.1-inch sensor co-developed with Sony, offering 33% more sensor area than the X5. It also runs an AI triple-chip architecture, including a 4nm Qualcomm chip that delivers five times the processing power of its predecessor. Add native Dolby Vision, 10-bit color at all frame rates, and I-Log, and you have a serious imaging tool. The X6 is also smaller, yet manages 140 minutes of 8K30 recording—a 51% improvement over the X5.

Forgetting the Camera Exists

Insta360 founder Liu Jingkang has a phrase he keeps returning to: “wugan,” which translates roughly to “without sensation” or “unnoticed.” His goal, he says, is to build a camera that you forget is even there. That might sound counterintuitive for a company that's spent a decade making cameras, but it's the core of his philosophy.

“The ideal camera is one that lets you forget it exists,” Liu says. “Our ultimate goal is to make the camera invisible. That's why we introduced the zero-edit feature—so the camera can automatically select and edit your footage while it charges and syncs to the cloud.”

For the X6, that means redesigning the entire chain from shooting to framing to editing. The company built a proprietary AI model called PanoMind, trained on over 10,000 hours of footage across 30+ scenarios like travel, cycling, diving, and skiing. The model can identify highlight moments, plan virtual camera moves, and evaluate how editable each clip is.

The AI Director That Works While You Sleep

Here's the scenario: you've spent a day exploring a new city, and you come back to your hotel room exhausted. You plug in the X6 to charge. Overnight, the AI Director analyzes your footage, picks the best moments, adds smooth camera movements, and cuts everything together. By morning, you've got a finished video waiting for you.

If you want more control, the app includes One-Tap Edit 2.0 and a feature called Moment Pro, which lets you specify people, scenes, themes, and video length. The idea is to offload the tedious post-production work that has always been the downside of 360 cameras.

This is a fundamental shift. In the past, “shoot first, frame later” just meant you delayed the framing decision. Now, Insta360 wants to hand that decision to AI as well.

Beyond the 360: First-Person Head Tracking and Virtual Gimbals

There's also a new first-person head-tracking module, launched alongside the company's first gimbal camera, the Luna Ultra. You wear the X6 on your chest, and the module allows you to control the view by simply turning your head—look left, the camera looks left. The output is a standard flat video, no 360 editing required.

Similarly, Gimbal Mode 2.0 uses the 360-degree capture to create a virtual gimbal. Paired with a joystick-equipped selfie stick, you can pan, zoom, and track subjects, outputting 4K flat video directly, with the option to keep the full spherical file.

What's happening here is that the X6 is becoming more than just a 360 camera. It's trying to absorb the roles of a gimbal camera and a wide-angle action cam. Liu's reasoning is consistent: reduce the attention the user has to pay to the act of photography itself.

Recording vs. Creating: The Real Market

Liu is careful to distinguish between “recording” and “creating.” “Our mission is to record and share, not to create,” he says. In his view, the market for creation is already saturated. If you want to make art, you have endless options—professional cameras, lenses, control. But recording is different.

“Recording can never be fully satisfied,” Liu argues. “You can't hire a photographer to be there for every moment you want to remember.” He believes the biggest untapped market isn't extreme sports, but the everyday moments: travel, time with family, watching your kids grow up. And the data backs him up—over half of Insta360's customers now buy for those reasons.

He even calls “how to make your girlfriend look good in photos” and “how to document your child's growth” the two biggest common denominators in consumer demand. That's a far cry from the helmet-cam crowd that first embraced the Nano.

Why the Market Is Bigger Than You Think

People often ask Liu about market size. Isn't a 360 camera a niche product? Won't phones and gimbals win? His answer is philosophical: “Market size isn't determined by a model. It depends on how many problems you solve.”

He doesn't like to project a ceiling based on current sales. Instead, he thinks about the distance to saturation. “When 360 cameras become as common as bottled water or smartphones, then we can talk about a ceiling. But we're still two orders of magnitude away from phones.”

“Those gaps are problems,” he says. “And problems are markets.”

What's Next: 12K, 16K, and AI That Knows You

One surprising fact: even at 8K, a 360 camera doesn't give you as much detail as you'd think. Because the pixels are spread across a full sphere, any single crop ends up with relatively low resolution. That's why Liu believes we'll see 12K and even 16K sensors in the future. But that brings challenges—more data to process, more heat, more battery drain. “We can't make the camera as big as a coffee cup,” he says.

The real revolution, though, will come from AI. Right now, the X6 edits overnight because on-device processing is still limited. As chips get more powerful and efficient, Liu envisions “shoot and edit instantly” becoming a reality. Eventually, the AI could learn your personal preferences—what you tend to keep, how you like to frame shots, your editing style—and tailor the output to you. He calls this the “AI photographer” that understands what you care about in any given moment.

From Video to Spatial Memory

Liu also showed a demo of 3D spatial reconstruction. With today's 360 footage, you can change the viewing angle, but not your position. His team is working on changing that—allowing you to move forward, get closer to subjects, even fly around a scene. The goal is to turn a 360 video into a navigable space.

“Current playback has a pain point: you can change the angle, but not the viewpoint,” he explains. In the future, you might wear a camera while walking through a market, and later be able to virtually walk through that same market again. It's a way of preserving not just a moment, but an entire environment.

There are hurdles—moving objects are still hard to reconstruct—but Liu is optimistic. He predicts VR will make a comeback, and when it does, these spatial recordings will offer a completely different viewing experience than a flat phone screen.

The Camera Company That Might Not Make Cameras

Liu doesn't shy away from the possibility that Insta360 might eventually stop making dedicated cameras altogether. AI could get so good that you could shoot a few flat photos and reconstruct a 3D scene from them. “We might become a software company,” he admits. “Our mission isn't tied to hardware.”

But he believes there's one thing AI can't replace: the genuine desire to record a real moment. “People press the shutter because that moment matters to them, because they want to remember it. That won't be replaced by AI.”

He also points out that some customers are already using Insta360 cameras for robotics—specifically, for training embodied AI. A first-person camera only sees what's in front of it, but a 360 camera captures the entire environment, which is far more useful for machine learning. It's a reminder of how the Nano found its first market: not as a sports camera, but as something users strapped to their helmets for skiing.

Ten years ago, Insta360's name was a promise: “instant 360,” or as Liu puts it, “shoot and get it immediately.” That promise has evolved from a single panoramic photo to an auto-edited film, a re-enterable space, and eventually, a camera that fades into the background of your life. For anyone building a side hustle around content creation, travel, or family memories, that's a promise worth paying attention to.