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."

Comments

Wait.

[More_Cowbell]

This story has been up for over four minutes and no comments about revolutionizing the pr0n industry?

Re:Wait.

[edwardpickman]

This story has been up for over four minutes and no comments about revolutionizing the pr0n industry?

We've already got 3D pr0n, they're called girls.

Re:Wait.

[More_Cowbell]

We've already got 3D pr0n, they're called girls.

Wait... are we still on Slashdot?

Re:Wait.

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried one of those "girls" once. I don't know. I suppose they're OK, but there are some issues that you have to take into consideration.

First of all they are ladened with pretty nasty Digital Rights Management. If you try to access one with your digits and you don't have the proper authorization, you're going to get whacked. And it's harder than you'd think to get authorization. The one I tried seemed to have been encumbered with the ForePlay(tm) DRM system. Man, you practically have to jump through hoops to get any access at all.

Also, you'd think that you pay once and it's yours forever, right? That's not how it works. It's kind of a pay-per-use situation. You've got to buy dinner, movie, etc. Then once you've spent all the cash, you have to negotiate the whole ForePlay system and then finally you get access -- maybe. These things seem to be pretty flakey, because most of the time I just got the "headache" response. What's worse is that the more time that goes by, you have to spend progressively more money. And even with that expenditure, somehow you end up will less and less access.

Oh and did I mention that you're only supposed to have one at a time? That's right. Let's say your primary girl is in headache mode, you aren't supposed to be able to get access to another girl. You just have to wait until the first one comes back on line. *And* most of them are equipped with spyware that calls you up every couple of hours and says inane things like, "Whatcha doin'?"

So, like I said, they're OK I guess. But probably they won't be that popular with most /.ers. I've heard you can rent them, but that it's also pretty expensive and you run the risk of getting viruses. Probably not worth the hassle, IMHO.

Re:Wait.

[AmigaHeretic]

We've already got 3D pr0n, they're called girls.

Yeah, but when I ever go into the locker room to view that "real" porn I get arrested.

Of course, I guess it still ends up with sex. It's just that it's then with a guy named Bubba who's sharing my cell. :(

Re:Wait.

[Anonymous Coward]

But you can protect yourself from the viruses, with something called -- oddly enough -- a "Trojan."

Re:Wait.

[Facegarden]

Heh, yours must be defective, i'd return her if i were you. Mine happily allows me to freely access her as needed with little work, and doesn't mind if i share some of my content with others, so long as it's only a temporary license (none of that annoying spyware either). I guess if your girl was an MS product, mine would be Linux - with compiz thrown in, 'cause she's actually cute too! ;) I just hope i don't find out down the line that i shouldn't have skipped that annoying EULA that came up at first... -Taylor

Re:Wait.

[xmark]

Make sure you get one with a PlaysForSure sticker on the package before you even *think* of inserting your USB key in the slot. And get rid of that pathetic 256MB unit you carry around in your jeans pocket. Go big or go home. After seeing what's up there on YouPorn, "girls" all want 8GB's (or more!) these days.

Re:Wait.

[awrowe]

You might think yours is GPL'd right now, but I think you are going to find that later, when you start thinking about distributing copies, that EULA is going to come up and bite you on the arse. At some point, they ALL have a clause about using other systems.

Me, I think I'm pretty lucky. Mine is expensive, but she brings me cans of beer and watches the football with me, while the dinner is being cooked and the washing machine is doing its things. I've hacked the access system so ForePlay is minimal, but on the whole it works ok

Closely related recent development from Adobe?

[neocrono]

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...

Uses

[explosivejared]

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.

Re:Sounds cool

[baffled]

Imagine how robust image editing will be. Instead of contrast-based edge-detection, you'll have 3d-surface based object detection.

Image analysis will be more accurate, in turn improving image search engine utility, giving robots better spatial vision, allowing big brother to identify bombs and brunettes more accurately, etc..

Lightfields

[ka9dgx]

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.

Research paper

[FleaPlus]

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."

Just imagine...

[madbawa]

....Goatse in 3D!!!! Yay!!

Re:Just imagine...

[Scrameustache]

....Goatse in 3D!!!! Yay!! That Z vectors' gotta be a pain in ass...

Re:Sounds cool

[gnick]

The human body is a far superior machine, and far less expensive. A human less expensive than a car? You obviously either:
1) Don't have children and/or have never tallied what you actually cost to house and maintain.
or
2) Live in a box, eat strays that you catch yourself, and don't bother with doctors or hygiene.

Ooh, bluescreen technology

[ZombieRoboNinja]

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.

Re:Ooh, bluescreen technology

[complete loony]

They've made some progress on the manufacturing front. Last time I saw this idea posted to /. they were talking about placing a sheet of small lenses in front of a standard camera CCD at the focal point of the main camera lens.

From what I understood the last time, each small lens intercepts all the light at that focal point and splits it up on the small pixel grid behind it. So instead of just getting the intensity of the light at that point you also capture vector information about where that light entered the main lens from. And you can do some interesting things with that data.

Say you get a bright spot on 2 pixels from the sensors behind neighboring small lenses, then in software you can do some ray tracing to work out exactly where that light originated from.

By choosing which pixels to sample and how to combine their values, you can build an image which simulates any aperture size, with any focal length, from the perspective of any point on the surface of your main lens.

Existing 3D technology

[TheMCP]

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.

Re:Super 3D?

[Garridan]

You mean, super 3D is 3D. With "jazz hands".

Re:Not Necessarily New

[kilraid]

There are pictures shot with the Stanford prototype, and they date back to 2005! Oh and be gentle with the 74 MB video...

http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera/

Re:Sounds cool

[daem0n1x]

Humans are cheap (and fun) to manufacture but the maintenance fee is a nightmare.

Re:Sounds cool

[camperdave]

Are you saying a brunette can't be da bomb? Fine. More for me.