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Researchers Develop Genuine 3D Camera
cylonlover writes "Cameras that can shoot 3D images are nothing new, but they don't really capture three dimensional moments at all — they actually record images in stereoscopic format, using two 2D images to create the illusion of depth. These photos and videos certainly offer a departure from their conventional two dimensional counterparts, but if you shift your view point, the picture remains the same. Researchers from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) hope to change all that with the development of a strange-looking camera that snaps 360 degrees of simultaneous images and then reconstructs the images in 3D."
of Stereoscopic....it's polyscopic? I dunno...this still seems like more of the same.
Unless it's doing a lot of moving around, it's just stereoscopic on steroids. If it stays in a fixed position, even though it has more than two cameras, all the objects are at fixed points. Until it can accurately judge the height, width and depth of an object without faking it in reconstruction, or making an educated guess - it's just more of the same. Humans suffer from the same limitations, but they fix this by moving the viewpoint around until a coherent 3D image is constructed.
Unless you have cameras that can accurately measure objects and move in the X and Y dimensions enough to cover the entire scene and all viewpoints for a given object, you're stuck in the same position - educated guessing.
Nor can the camera in the article. They keep talking about "being able to see the scene from any point", but that's a load of bullshit. All they've done is combined a 360 camera array (what Street View does) with stereoscopic vision (what regular 2-camera 3D does) to get a 360 view with depth information. So now you can look around in a scene in 3D, but you can't change your position. The camera still sees the scene only from one viewpoint, it's just that it has a full hemispherical field of view plus depth/3D info. Cool? Yes, but hardly a breakthrough, and definitely nothing like what they claim it does.
If the camera can't see something because it is obscured by another object, then it can't see it, period. The camera has a bit more info due to the use of multiple lenses somewhat offset from each other, but that's just like regular stereoscopic vision, and your viewpoint is still severely limitedd. You can do a better job of 3D scene reconstruction with three or four Kinects in different places than with this, since then you can actually obtain several perspectives simultaneously and merge them into a more complete 3D model of the scene.
Seriously, Slashdot can't handle the degree sign either? That's ISO-8859-1 for fuck's sake, not even one of the weirder Unicode characters.
Whoever tagged the story "france" got it wrong. The *real* Ecole polytechnique is of course in France, but this one is in Switzerland.
There's only one kind of "genuine" 3D camera, and it requires very special film and one of absolute stillness or high-power pulse lasers. We call the process "holography," and if it doesn't do that it's not a real 3D "camera."
Words mean things.
Here's a 5 cam version already commercialized http://bit.ly/aHDafK
"Nor can the camera in the article."
Nor does the article discuss how the "3D" images are to be viewed, beyond a very vague "...which is no longer limiting thanks to the 3D reconstruction."
Holograms? Those stupid-fucking glasses? A planetarium (that would actually make the most sense)?
he/she missed a few geometry classes too, because he/she thinks you can capture 3D with only one camera. and some other geometry classes, because he/she thinks a 2D array of 2D cameras makes a 4D camera.
simple explanation for apparent stupidity: we just fed a troll.
new sig
I'm glad to see people calling "bullshit" on this. I'm big into developments of PhotoSynth/Bundler/PMVS and other interesting 3D photogrammetry, so this is close to my heart. I'd just like to clear up a confusion though: "You can do a better job of 3D scene reconstruction with three or four Kinects in different places[...]" Unfortunately you can't, as the Kinects use structured light reconstruction, and the IR light patterns from multiple Kinects would confuse each other.
What about the 2-kinects video where the scene was shown from the viewpoint of a non-existant camera located somewhere between the two kinects?
the camera has a bit more info due to the use of multiple lenses somewhat offset from each other, but that's just like regular stereoscopic vision, and your viewpoint is still severely limitedd.
It doesn't have to be like regular steroscopic vision. The clever bit wouldn't be so much in the camera positions.
It would be in the image/scene processing: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9793272-39.html
See the video too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu31XWUxSkA
Based on both videos, Adobe's tech looks more impressive to me. And they did that years before.
Bullshit. This is not genuine 3D. This is just stereovision using a lot of cameras demonstrated by a guy with a 'orrible french accent that talks a lot about what could be done but in fact they do not even come close to what this other guy built in a fraction of the time using a MS Kinect: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-w7UXCAUJE
That video also makes it very clear why the fantasies of the french guy will never come true. At least not with that camera.
0x or or snor perron?!