What does the founder of a camera company want more than anything? For you to forget cameras exist at all. That’s the eyebrow-raising vision Insta360 CEO JK Liu (Liu Jingkang) laid out in a recent interview, and it says a lot about where the 360 imaging pioneer thinks the whole industry is heading.
The philosophy is rooted in a personal frustration. Liu recalls taking an Insta360 X5 test unit on a trip, stumbling across a street performance, and immediately hitting record — only to spend the entire time staring at the monitor, terrified of losing the subject. “I picked up the camera because I didn’t want to miss the moment,” he says, “but by focusing on the camera, I missed it anyway.” That tension, he argues, is baked into every traditional camera: it asks you to live the moment and operate the machine simultaneously. A bad trade-off.
His answer is what he calls the “future cameraman” — not a single product, but a long-term goal for a device that behaves like a real camera operator. Liu breaks it into three ingredients: it must see, understand, and act. See more of the world, which is why 360 capture matters so much; understand depth, motion and orientation rather than just recording pixels; and act in real time by tracking, stabilizing, composing and predicting movement. “AI is the brain, the lens is the eye, and stabilization and motion systems give it the ability to move naturally,” he explains.
If this sounds like a robotic pipe dream, Liu insists Insta360 is closer than people think. The company already ships many of the building blocks: AI-based stitching, FlowState stabilization, subject tracking, reframing, automatic editing and heavy on-device processing. “They may look like separate features, but together they show the same shift — the camera is starting to perceive, understand, and assist.”
That thinking is embodied in the X5, the flagship Liu has openly called Insta360’s “dream camera.” It’s a 360 shooter designed to be so compact and light you won’t even notice it’s there. Under the hood it shoots 8K30fps 360 video (supersampled down from 11K to 8K), packs 1/1.28-inch sensors that are 144% larger than those on the X4, and runs a Triple AI Chip system — one 5nm AI Chip plus two Pro Imaging Chips. It’s been available to order since April 22, 2025, priced at US$549.99.
The X5 also leans hard into Insta360’s “shoot first, frame later” mantra — capture the full scene now, decide on the composition afterward. “It reduces the fear of missing the moment,” Liu says. “First, you remove the anxiety of capture. Then you give people the freedom to be present.”
On the R&D side, the company is pouring resources into a panoramic depth foundation model, panoramic image generation built on a Diffusion Transformer architecture, and a unified monocular 3DGS model spanning wide-angle, fisheye and 360 cameras. “The future camera won’t just be a better lens with a better sensor,” Liu concludes. “It will be a perception system with taste. The best technology doesn’t ask for your attention. It gives it back.”
