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Researchers Develop Genuine 3D Camera

Posted by timothy on from the now-in-stereo dept.

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."

6 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Quick question by marcansoft · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:Quick question by marcansoft · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. Lausanne is in Switzerland by martin-boundary · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Whoever tagged the story "france" got it wrong. The *real* Ecole polytechnique is of course in France, but this one is in Switzerland.

  4. No. by The+Master+Control+P · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:No. by CityZen · · Score: 3, Interesting

      We should use the appropriate terminology: light fields. A traditional camera captures a point sample of a light field: you see a correct image from 1 point of view. A hologram captures a 2D planar sample of a light field: you see a correct image from any perspective that looks through the film (as if it's a window). To capture a volume sample of a lightfield is not really possible (at least, not at the same instant in time), since that requires having a sensor be placed everywhere in the volume, and of course the sensor itself interferes with the light samples that it's taking.

  5. Re:Quick question by Rhaban · · Score: 3, Informative

    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?