Google's New Camera App Simulates Shallow Depth of Field

Posted by timothy on Saturday April 19, 2014 @07:30AM from the give-your-mom-an-easter-bokeh dept.

New submitter katiewilliam (3621675) writes with a story at Hardware Zone about a new feature that Google's working on for Android phones' built-in cameras: the illusion of shallow depth of field in phone snapshots, which typically err on the side of too much in focus, rather than too little. Excerpting: "The Google Research Blog [note: here's a direct link] revealed that there's quite a fair bit of algorithms running to achieve this effect; to put it in a nutshell, computer vision algorithms create a 3D model of the world based on the shots you have taken, and estimate the depth to every point in the scene."

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Re:2 1/2 D by BasilBrush · 2014-04-19 08:34 · Score: 5, Interesting

Depends what you mean by 3D modelling. Looking further at the article, it's a depth mapping technique for each pixel. Which is more analogous to DOOM than Quake. Remember those restrictions? No bridges in the map, no tables. Just a single height for the floor and a single height for the ceiling at any map position.
As the OP says it's 2.5D not 3D.