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World's First 3D Webcam Tested
CNETNate writes "The world's first 3D webcam not only takes anaglyphic images, but will let you have a stereoscopic 3D video chat over the Internet. It's the work of a unique camera called 'Minoru,' which has been tested and documented in a feature today. Be warned though: anaglyphic photography was clearly not invented to create comfortably-viewable videos."
Finally! My old, 2D webcam kept falling through the cracks in the floorboards.
Amateur pornographers of the world rejoice.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
Step 1: build something
Step 2: Figure out how to use it to make porn
Step 3: make porn
Step 4: Profit!
The problem with all 3d is that the lenses on the glasses must be calibrated to the colors on the display for optimal effect. For example if the images appear in the wrong shade of blue and red, you might begin to see both images in both eyes (no 3d).
With a properly calibrated display and some good quality glasses I'd bet the effect is quite good.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Because everyone will have to be using 3d glasses.
Unless you make the 3d glasses somewhat invisible to the 3D camera and... ow my head!!
..or does Minoru look like the mutant love-child of Number 5 from Short Circuit and Stewie from Family Guy?
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
Then they started putting out all these animated films in 3-D- Robots, Beowulf, Up, etc. And I kept paying the extra to see the 3-D versions. Something kept bothering me though. Then, in the middle of Up, I realized what it was: after about 10 minutes, I stopped noticing that it was 3-D at all. I mean, if you get really absorbed in a movie, you don't need it to be 3-D anyway... and frankly, 3-D images never look three dimensional like they do in the real world. They have an otherworldly quality that seems, at least to me, in some ways less natural than 2-D images. Maybe it's that they don't define the subtleties of the true three dimensional world well enough, I don't know. Half the time it almost seems like I'm looking at one of those paper cut-out toy theatres where there's several levels of depth, but everything on each level is flat and it's only the levels themselves that are spaced apart. Am I the only one who feels this way?
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Am I missing something, or is this just two ordinary webcams that superimpose their images onto one another? Why did it take so long for someone to duct tape 2 cameras together?
We're lucky that Slashdot is still in good old 2-D. Otherwise my eyes would just have been poked out by your comment.
Ezekiel 23:20
There's several reasons why you may not find them all that '3D'...
starting with the obvious: it's not 3D, it's stereographic. We still call that '3D' because you get depth cues from it and depth would be the third dimension.
also obvious: when you move your head, the perspective doesn't change. For 2D, your brain doesn't care so much* as it's been trained in seeing 2D images since you were born. Stereographic images however do fool your brain into getting a depth cue, and it assumes that because it gets depth cues, you should be able to get a different perspective by moving your head. This confusion fades after a short while (depends on the person), but it'll always be there. The worst thing is.. your eyes jitter, even if you keep your head perfectly still, your eyes will still be bouncing all over the place - with minute movements, but your brain still expects the minute differences in perspective it's used to from actual 3D environments.
less obvious: you get depth cues of, say, an object being up close... something silly like the sword in Beowulf... right at you through the screen. You look at it, essentially crossing your eyes a little like you would any object that gets closer to you.. but now something funny happens. Your eyes, when they cross, by virtue of the brain will try to focus at a depth of the intersection point of your two eyes*. However, the film is not -actually- 3D.. so you're at the mercy of whatever focus the film's producer decided upon. So if that tip of the sword is squarely out of focus, your brain sits there wondering what the $&#* is going on. This effect is not so pronounced for surfaces further away (much like a focal distance on your camera of 15m will happily cover 14m and 16m as well, and far beyond those; while a macro shot at 2cm distance requires very careful positioning of your camera's distance to the subject to get the correct part in focus... e.g. photographing an insect and trying to get its head, rather than some leg in focus) - but at the same time, depth cues get much less pronounced as surfaces get further away - simply as they converge with perspective.
There's a few other reasons, including keystoning of the projection (when seeing a stereographic 3D feature, try to sit as close to the center of the screen when projected out to the seating as possible), but the above are the main three.
It bugs me as well, but for some movies it's absolutely worth seeing the '3D' version.
* This is also the main reason why some people have issues trying to see side-by-side type stereographic images. Getting your eyes to see a surface at one distance (depending on how much you have to cross your eyes to make the two images overlap), while the lenses of each eye focus on another distance (the display surface) can be unnatural and some people simply never get it happening for them.
For kicks.. close your left eye, now with your right eye, try to focus on a nearer distance (without cheating using another surface). Do the same with the right eye closed and left eye open. If you can do this, you can probably watch side-by-side stereographic images (of the cross-eye method) easily.
Now for your brain kicking in.. open both eyes, and try again. You'll find this difficult at best and impossible at worst - without, in fact, going cross-eyed.
Human visual system is fun - and that's without going into any optical illusion stuff :)
Clearly I had to break out my red-blue anaglyph glasses and damn that video made my eyes and brain hurt.
The playback software has some glitches in it (not a youtube playback thing) because one image would freeze while the other eye would continue playing. They really need to fix that. The ad popup thing in youtube didn't help either.
It was good but a gimmick at best. Plus all my work colleagues looked at me weird with the glasses on until they realise what the hell I was doing. Then they came over for a gander. Who's cool now?
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Using it to produce 3D video seems gimmicky and, as someone pointed out, who wants to look at everybody wearing 3D glasses? I think a better use would be to use the two cameras to allow calculation of distances and then replace everything beyond a certain distance. Sort of a green screen effect but without the green screen. Now that would be useful (and cool).
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
Big tits will become immensely popular.... again
Hope is the currency of fools
How long must I wait for OSX or Linux drivers for this thing? Should I just give up and make my own V4L filter that can color shift and merge two webcams into one? (should be easy, but do I want to glue to cameras together that badly)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
All I can picture in my head is two executives on opposites sides of the world both looking like tools with coloured goggles on their heads - and having the whole thing on camera (I would "accidentally" record the video conference call).