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

Does Anyone Actually Want it?

[tomxor]

Yes it could be done and made cheaply... if it's something that consumers actually want, beyond a gimmicky "My phone has it" selling point.

Maybe i'm just not consumer enough, but i don't really want my photos or video to be 3D, in the same way that film looks better at 24FPS and games look better at >60FPS.

I think high frame rates and depth perception are along the same lines as far as application goes, they bring ultra realism. For things like games, simulations etc that's great. But for many forms of media it seems that lack of realism and it's artistic capacity are somehow entwined, adding ultra realism seems to destroy that. Granted - selfies are tenuously artistic so perhaps this will make it into phones.

Re:Does Anyone Actually Want it?

[Solandri]

Yes you want it. There are two things the humungous DSLR lenses give you: More light so you can capture images in dark situations with less noise. And shallow depth of field.

We''re finally reaching the point I predicted in the early 1990s when the first digital cameras with reduced sensor size came out. That spawned endless debates about what exactly the sensor size did to the depth of field. It turns out when you reduce sensor size, you increase depth of field. This results in photos that look like they were shot with a point and shoot modern digital cameras - everything in the photo is in sharp focus. This happens in the 35mm point and shoot because the lens has a small aperture (ratio of lens diameter to focal length). In digital cameras it happens because they use a tiny fingernail-sized sensor.

To generate creative effects like isolating the subject of a photo from the foreground and background using focus, you need a DSLR with a large lens and large sensor. Would the photo of the Afghan Girl been so striking if the dirty wall of the refugee camp behind her had been in sharp focus?

You can simulate shallow depth of field in software by blurring portions of the photo. But this is usually just a guess based on location in the photo. e.g. Blur the bottom and top third, leave the middle third in focus. It ends up looking rather fake, which is bad unless fake is the effect you're trying to achieve. (That last one's a real scene, it just looks like a miniature because shallow depth of field is also characteristic of photographic miniatures. Your brain has seen it so often that it associates extreme shallow depth of field with miniatures.)

With a sensor which also captures 3D depth info, the sensor and lens size limitation is gone. You can perfectly blur the image in software to simulate any depth of field, from shallow, to deep. Even effects not possible with optical lenses, like non-linear depth of field, are possible. The only remaining reason to lug around huge DSLR lenses is for low-light photography with little noise.

Re:Image quality

[JaredOfEuropa]

I think it's nothing short of amazing how far tablet / phone cameras have come in terms of picture quality, given the crappy lens and tiny sensor. Zoom, low light performance and a halfway decent flash are the obvious things missing from those cameras, but pictures taken in good light conditions actually look very good. Good enough to enlarge and print, and good enough for most people to be unable to tell that the photo was taken with a phone rather than a proper camera.

And nothing beats the camera you have on you.

Re:yay

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with 3D selfies of boobs? Are you gay? Do you hate your country? ARE YOU A COMMUNIST?

Do not want

[AndyMan!]

3D has been "The next big thing" for more than 150 years. Starting with crude Stereoscope viewers in the mid 1800's, a resurgence in the 70's with the first mass market 3D movies, an attempt at another resurgence in the 2000's, and a push by the industry for 3D TV's more recently. Each of these technologies has shown the exact same pattern - a bit of novelty when they're first introduced, then tiredness, and quickly - a clear consumer rejection.

The amount of money tech companies have invested in 3D over the last century is staggering, and the consumer rejection has been consistent. I can't think of a better disconnect between producer and consumer.

So here we are again. We're supposed to get excited over yet another 3D Next Big Thing. No thanks. Just like every example that's come before, I'm perfectly happy and even prefer the current state of my photography. I am an avid first-adopter, but I have absolutely no intention of ever adopting 3D photography.

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.

One interesting side-effect: 3D fakery is harder

[QilessQi]

Photoshopping a single image can be done easily in ways that make the edits virtually undetectable, even for the casual home user. But an amateur attempting to edit two nearly-identical images (e.g., to modify body shapes, or skin tone, or to get rid of unwanted parts of the scene) would almost certainly leave behind inconsistencies that simple image analysis could detect.

...Today, that is.

There will probably be a niche for home-use 3D Photoshop extensions that perform activities like airbrushing, texture duplication, etc. on two images simultaneously in a manner that always results in a clean combination of the two by effectively performing the edits in 3-space. Heck, such technology may already be in use in movie studios that are cranking out 3D movies with live actors that must be composited with generated scenes.

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.