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CMU Video Conference System Gets 3D From Cheap Webcams
Hesham writes "Carnegie Mellon University's HCI Institute just released details on
their "why-didn't-I-think-of-that-style" 3D video conferencing application. Considering how stale development has been in this field, this research seems like a nice solid step towards immersive telepresence. I was really disappointed with the "state-of-the-art" systems demoed at CES this year — they are all still just a flat, square, video stream. Hardly anything new. What is really cool about this project, is that researchers avoided building custom hardware no one is going to ever buy, and explored what could be done with just the generic webcams everyone already has. The result is a software-only solution, meaning all the big players (AIM, Skype, MSN, etc.) can release this as a simple software update. 'Enable 3D' checkbox anyone? YouTube video here. Behind the scenes, it relies on a clever illusory trick (motion
parallax) and head-tracking (a la Johnny Lee's Wiimote stuff — same
lab, HCII). It was just presented at IEEE International
Symposium on Multimedia in December."
Dundle Linux has been supporting something like this since its first version, just a few months ago. Skype is already on board.
John Carmack prototyped this a few years back. His conclusion at the time was that there was too much lag in the system to make it really useful.
Games with faked 3D are known as "2.5D" -- most notably, most side-scrolling fighting adventure games, like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series for the NES.
It's not pure 2D like the Mario/Metroid NES/SNES games, but it's not pure 3D either.
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First off, the image would be an, ugly, red/blue mess. Secondly, even if you used one of the more advanced shutter glasses or polerized 3d techniques you'd still end up looking at someone wearing goofy 3d glasses abscuring eye contact. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with wearing 3d glasses when playing games or watching a movie but not when I'm trying to converse, face to face, with someone.
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Geometric view interpolation is not unknown in the labs right now, and in some cases is being researched for exactly the reason you suggest. As another poster suggested, there are certainly some cases where the interpolation will break down. (Put a hand in front of each webcam at the side of your monitor, and it won't interpolate two palms to look like your face, for example.) Another one is that anything transparent makes it impossible to estimate the depth at a particular point because there are actually two depth values there. So, the smoke from your cigarette which is an amorphous volume of semitransparency through which you can see a window, the schmutz on the window, a reflection on the window, and something through the window will just ruin any chance of doing the interpolation properly. When you try to shift the pixel correctly to accomodate for the view shift, you get like seven different answers for what direction it is supposed to go.
Still, look up the Foundry's "Ocula" system for 3D cinematography. It's a shipping commercial product that does a lot of strong magic with stereoscopic imagery on a daily basis. (Which i would have assumed was currently impossible.)
It's too slow to be used for real time conferencing. You let it cook overnight for a single shot, or a handful of shots to compute disparity maps offline. It needs to be at least an order of magnitude faster to be practical for real time work. Thankfully, there are a lot of researches trying to figure out clever hacks to speed up these sorts of things, and a lot of engineers figuring out ways to build stonking GPU's to run OpenCL in a year or two. Expect stereo stuff to become mainstream somewhere around 2011-2012 would be my guess.