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Stanford Team Developing Super 3D Camera
Tookis writes "Most of us are happy to take 2D happy snaps with single lens digital cameras. Imagine if you had a digital camera that could more accurately perceive the distance of all objects in its field of vision than your own eyes and brain. That's exactly what a team of researchers from Stanford University are working on — and it could even be affordable for ordinary consumers."
Go Bears!
The CB App. What's your 20?
*imagines a 3D digital photo frame*
This story has been up for over four minutes and no comments about revolutionizing the pr0n industry?
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
This sounds like sort of a flip of what Adobe announced recently with their "compound eye" camera lens. The benefit with that, I suppose, is that you'd be able to use your existing camera body provided the lens had the right adapter.
It looks like here we've got an image sensor that would allow you to use your own lens, again provided that whatever camera body it found its way into had the right adapter. They also mention that it doesn't necessarily need an objective lens, though, and that's interesting...
But there are a number of other possibilities for a depth-information camera: biological imaging, 3-D printing, creation of 3-D objects or people to inhabit virtual worlds, or 3-D modeling of buildings...
... that cute girl next door, the cute girl that works across the street, the cute girl walking down the street.
This could revolutionize the entire practice of voyeurism completely! Stanford == science for the masses.
I got a catholic block.
... are going to be a bitch to store!
Awful UID - but I have been here ages...
This has been reported several times before and the idea behind it is not new at all. The camera captures what's called a "lightfield" in computer graphics. I'm looking forward to a working camera with this technology though.
The insects are calling.
The work they've been doing on lightfields is pretty innovative. I first heard about this when Robert Scoble interviewed Marc Levoy and got some cool demos into the video. I've done some lightfield experiments with my trusty Nikon D40, it's interesting to see what new ideas you can come up with for using a camera once you get into it.
For anyone interested in more than the press release, here's a link to their paper, "A 3MPixel Multi-Aperture Image Sensor with 0.7m Pixels in 0.11m CMOS."
....Goatse in 3D!!!! Yay!!
The Stanford camera uses a dense array of micro-cameras with one main objective lens for large scans, or for macro, just the array without said lens. Apple's patent filing is for a much larger (physically), sparser array in an integral camera-display--a display and compound camera made of micro-cameras interspersed with the pixels in a display.
One would expect that Apple's method could provide similar z-axis data, no?
That doesn't even require a blue screen! Just tell it to cancel out everything > 5 feet away and you're set. That'll be fun for webcam stuff.
Also, I'm not quite sure I'm understanding this right, but would this mean the camera is NEVER out of focus? Like, you'll be able to make out every detail of my thumbprint on the corner of the lens and also see the face of the person I'm photographing and ALSO read the inscription on the wall half a mile behind them?
Man, this thing sounds really cool.
Before adobe had announced their camera, I did some research. There are existing patents which cover using multiple lenses on various types of surfaces allowing the very same thing (like insect compound eyes) allowing software to capture 3D images. using multiple sensors like this is a way to capture light as a vector and not just as pixel of intensity.
What the hell is "Super 3D"? You take a picture, with some data about the 3D structure. That sounds like 3D. Super 3D would be, perhaps, 4D. Or maybe something that doesn't exactly give 4D data, but gives the impression of it. This isn't that -- this is 3D. Are all scientific journalists retards, or does Slashdot just pick the biggest ones?
I read TFA and WOW, it's such a very simple idea, easy to make, and has such enormously cool implications! Simple ideas are often the best!
-- Cheers!
You know, we're coming even closer to Minority Report tech with this. Presumably you could shoot videos with this stuff and you could get that cool projection tech that makes hologram-type videos. Plus you can modify Wii controllers to make those awesome multi-touch screens. With a bit of money, we could even clone Tom Cruise and have him fight crime with jetpacks and sonic blasters. I'm telling you, 2054 man, just a few decades away...
Before everyone gets excited over 3D porn, I think we should consider existing 3D technology, and how this differs.
Stereographic imagery has existed since before the creation of the camera. 3D cameras have undergone several bouts of popularity. As a child, I remember my grandfather getting out his ancient 3D camera, and my father had a 3D adapter for his regular camera. 3D lenses are now available for digital SLRs, and if you are interested in video, you can even get a box that converts 2D TV to 3D TV in realtime. (Note: CRT TV required. That aside, I've got one, and it works much better than I expected.)
Among the advantages of the system they're describing in the article we're discussing is that it actually has depth information for everything in the image, and using that, it can either be used for measurements or to pick out things in the image at specific depths. It also can be done with one lens, so the 3D image can be rotated while preserving the 3D effect. With conventional stereo imagery, you have to use 2 lenses, and if you turn the camera sideways to take the picture, you can only ever look at it sideways afterward.
In all, I think this new system sound like a great advance and I hope they'll license it cheaply so it can become widely used.
Having read the article it's unclear to me how they actually get depth information, depth from focus?
Another camera that can capture 3D that I came across during a conference trip is the Z-CAM. Demonstration videos at http://www.3dvsystems.com/gallery/gallery.html. It uses a laser for each pixel to measure depth. It's still in prototype but I know at least one Korean university has manage to get hold of one to play around with.
I thought everyone knew that hotnwetware operates strictly on a point-to-point protocol, and that broadscast protocols were inefficient on bandwidth and were less stable.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Remember that device resources have to be scheduled. Make sure that your Relational Operating System isn't suffering from interrupt exhaustion. You should probably verify that your signal handlers are compatible, or the handshake won't go through correctly. Some devices appear to have a shared buffer, so input to them is rejected if they have not completed a communications transaction. Others seem to operate over transactional TCP, rejecting any session that is not complete to specifiction. So long asthe I/O is RFC-compliant, you shouldn't have any issues.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If you use a high-res 16bpp b/w digital camera, you can produce "true" HDR images by using the same technique as an early Russian photographer - simply rotate between red, green and blue filters. You now have a 48bpp colour image. If you now apply the 3D techniques, you would get a far more realistic 3D image (as you have far better data to work with).
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The camera is in practice a 4D sensor, organised as an array of arrays,
an array of smaller cameras, put on a single 2D pixel sensor. (I gather)
The problem with this is that the picture to be taken, is 3D, not 4D.
Thus there is one extra unnecessary dimension. This means that for a 100 MPixel (100^4)
sensor, there will be about 100^3 voxels in the resulting 3D image, while it should
have been 464^3 if it had been efficient.
One simple way to make it efficient, is to make a short movie with an ordinary camera,
while changing focus, thus getting different focus on different pictures in the sequence.
If the scene is moving, this may be a problem for the processing software. One way to solve
that is to make a 3D camera the following way:
Construct it like a camera, except that there are several mostly transparent
mirrors deflecting the light into several sensors, each focused at a different length.
This could of course also be used to make pictures with sharpness everywhere.
Kim Øyhus, Quantum physicist.
I read this article yesterday, it seems related: Skjut från höften (in Swedish, but has some pretty pictures!)
It's about a Standford Scientist, Ren Ng, that has made a camera where the focus plane can be set after the shot has been taken, using a set of microlenses just the way this article describes. Should be related, but how could a camera already be working if these guys just publicized?
There is the paper about the multi-apeture camera by the same guys:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4114959
(Provided that your uni has acceess)
This is old news, a high-technology firm has already released one of these stereo-cameras.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
A Zbuffer for digital cameras? Yas pleez!
Just think of all the depth of field stuff you could do in postprocessing.
From the article: "But there are a number of other possibilities for a depth-information camera: biological imaging, 3-D printing, creation of 3-D objects or people to inhabit virtual worlds, or 3-D modeling of buildings"
Why do you need a new and special camera for doing this when you can use your old digital camera?
2 ordinare photos of the same thing contains enough information to create a 3D model. This is old http://www.photo-to-3d.com/
This seems like interesting and cool technology. But I'm not sure exactly how far it takes us, because if the total distance between the most extreme lenses in the array is only a few inches, it's not as if you could reconstruct the full scene and synthesize views from any viewpoint: the background objects are still concealed behind the foreground objects and the lenses don't have much capability to look "around" them, which in turn means that the finished product will still have to be "viewed" from a very narrow range of viewpoints.
This seems to imply a viewing system in which either the picture falls apart if you move your head more than a few inches... or a stereoscope-like device holds your head in one position... or glasses or a lenticular screen cause the stereo image to "move with" your head and become geometrically distorted if viewed from the wrong viewpoint. (That's the Achilles heel of all theatrical 3D movies: they look bizarre to any viewer seated outside a tiny "sweet spot" in the middle of the house).
The idea that this will revolutionize ordinary consumer photography seems unlikely. The market has been thoroughly, thoroughly, thoroughly tested. The basic stereoscope, which requires nothing more than a pair of cameras, was invented in 1840, and "prerecorded" cards were very popular in Victorian times, just as the ViewMaster was in the last century.
Various consumer-level stereo cameras have been around forever. Various models have been at least reasonably compact, reasonably inexpensive. Processing has been reasonably available. At worst, mail-order, and mail-order is viable enough to keep Shutterfly and Snapfish in business. IIRC Sawyer had processing service that let consumers receive their 3D happy snaps in the form of Viewmaster reels. A few years ago some company offered a cheap one-use camera... I think Ritz carried them... with IIRC four lenses and a processing service that returned no-glasses-or-stereoscope-needed direct-view lenticular 3D images.
What people seems to want around 4x6" color still 2D prints. The resolution doesn't even really need to be more than about 2 megapixels! If anything, the trend is to email pictures, implying even lower resolution, or pass around the camera (or cell phone or iPod) and let friends see the grandchildren, or Fred acting goofy on a snowboard, or amateur pr0n, on a 2.5 inch 200 dpi screen.
Offhand, I'd say the evidence of the marketplace... for a century... is that people don't even care much about 3D pr0n. Remember, the technology for viewing commercially produced stereo images has been available and cheap, and even the equipment for producing them has been inexpensive by commercial standards. Although I remember getting, um excited, around age 16, by an arcade stereoscopic device featuring color stereoscopic views of topless women, because, you know, they seemed so close and so real.)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
There, fixed it for you.
After reading the article I'm unclear whether this camera produces metric depth information. I did come across another camera that's about the size of a webcam and uses laser and time of flight to measure distance. Saw it mentioned at a conference I was attending. A demo of the Z-CAM is at http://www.3dvsystems.com/gallery/gallery.html. Pretty cool. It's targeted at consumer applications, still in prototype stage last time I enquired.
Cameras that take 3D images have been around since the beginning of photography. The real impediment to 3D images is not the camera but the display. Most require glasses of some kind for viewing and for most people that extra inconvenience does not offset the benefits of 3D.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Cool, but old story.
I can't believe there was no mention of their web site on either this Slashdot posting or the article.
Watch the movie!
http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera/
http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera/lfcamera.avi
It'd be cool if something like this actually worked sort of similar to imodeller, dsculptor, and/or quicktime vr.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Light Field Photography with a Hand-Held Plenoptic Camera. A regular camera with a special lens that emulates the "thousands of tiny lens" from the thing in the article. Includes pictures and a video of how the focus of images taken with the camera can be adjusted as a post processing step.
Finally there is a method to give depth perception to AI and robots without a million lines of code needing to be written for mediocre results. They will know where things are in relation to each other and themselves via real time lightfield info.... and once they map it out internally, won't even need to look at things to know where they are... just triangulate based on last known location and what ever is in their field of vision.
Moreover... imagine the interface options now. Suddenly we have Minority Report interfaces just over the horizon. As in you can have a camera/sensor that can tell if you've just 'touched' something in thin air (even if there is no image floating there to touch, though that would help us to know what we're trying to interface with).
We'll have touch screens you don't even have to touch... the camera will just map up the location of your finger tip and your eyes with the depth map and account for perspective... or go with eyetracking software, except now you won't need to be sitting at just the right distance... the depth mapping will account for that and compensate.
Of course both of these is assuming that this sensor goes 4D/video capture capable... which I expect it will.
What I really want though is a pair of glasses/goggles which will process whatever I'm viewing and let me do selective deletion of objects (or selective addition of virtual objects).... match it up with some memory of prior views and the result will be seamless... 3D modeling in real time views...
oh there are so many options.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Anyone know what the Z data resolution and accuracy is? What about the size of the head? I'm trying to get the topography of the inside of some very small objects and I'd love to use something like this.
Dunno, seems like some earlier research on a similar idea might be more useful - the plenoptic camera. Just one big CCD and a lot of math. CCDs are getting bigger all the time, most people don't really need all the pixels they have already, so sure, why not use some of those pixels for depth. But sticking with one CCD will probably be cheaper. http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera/
we're developing a MEGA super-duper 3D camera.
Why aren't more cameras using CMY filters instead of BRGR filters?
The biggest downside I see of current cameras is that they need a lot of light for an image; if you can get 2 photons/color I would think that you would end up with a much more sensitive camera, but I've only seen that in some astronomy cameras...