3D Cameras Are About To Go Mainstream

An anonymous reader writes: Vox's Timothy B. Lee reports that everyday imaging is about to take a big step forward as 3D photography finally makes it to prime time. Technological advances in 3D processing algorithms have accelerated at the same time the equipment for taking these shots has become significantly cheaper. Those facts combined mean that we're going to be seeing 3D cameras become much more prevalent very quickly. "If things go according to Intel's plan, within a few years all of our tablets and laptops, and perhaps even our smartphones, will have fancy 3D cameras instead of boring old 2D ones." Throw in the fledgling industries of commercial camera drones and autonomous vehicles, and you have a lot of major companies throwing huge amounts of research money into making cheap 3D cameras work. "The result will be a proliferation of devices, from tablets to self-driving cars, that understand and interact with the world around them."

Comments

Image quality

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Too bad the image quality in "tablets and laptops, and perhaps even our smartphones" is dreadful compared to even pretty basic point and shoot. Optical zoom, low light performance, time to focus, time from power off (or sleep) to on and recording.

Bad summary! No cookie! (3D Computer vision)

[KitFox]

This is definitely a case of picking the worst summary of the source article possible. When I looked at the /. summary, I immediately thought "3D is going out in movies and TV, and haven't we been there with the HTC Evo 3D?". Obviously a lot of other people did too.

So I clicked on TFA. Ahhhhhhhh... Now it makes more sense! From TFA:

We're used to our gadgets being passive objects. They respond to typed or tapped commands, but we don't expect them to be aware of their surroundings.

... As our devices have more and better sensors, they're going to be increasingly aware of the world around them, and will interact with the world and with us in more sophisticated ways.

So other than the really gimmicky "personal drones that can take breathtaking aerial shots", this is primarily talking about computer vision, such as gesture recognition, local environment evaluation, etc.

Not 3D cameras

[fyngyrz]

TFA accurately describes using multiple 2D scene acquisitions in order to build a 3D model by trading time and resolution for position.

TFA does not in any way describe "3D cameras."

3D cameras would acquire a 3D representation of subject matter directly. Such cameras do exist; but they are not about to "go mainstream" in any meaningful or accurate sense of the term.

Imagine a 12" cube with numbers on every face. Place a stereo (likely dual sensor / dual lens) camera in front of it, collinear with any one of the six axis. Acquire image. Now, tell me what number is on the face of the cube furthest from the camera.

You can't? Of course you can't. Because you didn't acquire anything even close to 3D data on the object.

Now place the same cube in front of a system that looks at it from, say, 32 directions on a plane parallel to the floor and acquire. Now you can tell me what is on the far side of the cube, because in this case, something somewhat closer to 3D data acquisition was actually performed (and can be used to immediately give you views at angles and distances of much finer granularity than 32.) It's still not actually 3D (what's on the bottom of the cube? The top? For that matter, what's inside it?) but even with the fairly reasonable limits of opacity, at least a system of this kind would be able to present you with the appropriate representation if it was informed that you had moved your viewpoint horizontally or circularly relative to the data's representation on the display device and on essentially the same viewing plane as the camera set.