I don't have a cardboard to properly see if the image really is "3D", but it seems like it's just a photosphere and therefore doesn't really have depth information. Is that right?
Now I have the nightmares again. (I got to implement spherical projections in realtime on a Pentium 90. It's... an interesting problem. Yeah. That's what I'll call it)
Yeah, and there are some other in-dev camera rigs that use multiple cameras plus software interpolation to simulate 3d as well.
The thing that's most intriguing to me are the experiments using multiple depth cameras set up around a space and using software to build a live, 3d model and overlay the video data as a texture on top of the models. It's all very rudimentary and low-res at the moment but it's the sort of thing that can eventually become 3d/VR telepresence and that just strikes me as awesome.
I'm very new to this sort of thing, but it seems like "stereoscopic video" isn't nearly as common as I expected it to be. 2D panoramas seem to be very much the norm. I'm not sure if this is down to production difficulty, delivery difficult or stereoscopy just not being impressive enough.
One thing is that it seems to me that anything that's recorded by a camera (rather than rendered in realtime) is going to be "wrong" once you tilt your head, as your eyes are now on top of each other rather than next to each other.
Yup. The Ricoh Theta S captures spherical panoramas. The VR terminology is just overselling it. Neat idea though. It would be cool if there was a sonic component.
I think you're on to something. Say we record monaural audio with directional mics on/beside each cam, then encode and compress each stream, allowing for realtime stereo mixing during playback determined by view angle. Add a compass, accelerometer, gyro to track orientation. Couldn't we then achieve the desired effect and even simulate spatial audio effects, 6DoF movement in scene, blend UI sounds and add 3D sound to the environment? AR anyone? With a small peripheral you could emit a few chirps at diff frequencies and measure them using same mic rig to create a virtual map of the environment's acoustic characteristics and use it to render sound effects for composite elements, generated UI, nav feedback, similar to the way image based lighting is used today to make artificially generated objects appear as if they were really present in the scene.
Sounds like a good open hardware/software project but I'm short on cameras and mics for something like that. Anyone see potential there?
Combine with laser rangers and filters for their wavelength on the cams, and you can sample 3d point cloud data too and render the environment as a 3D (4D) scene, use it for composite reference, or slap a small LiDAR scanner under the whole thing for precise measurement.