CNETNate writes "The world's first 3D webcam not only takes anaglyphic images, but will let you have a stereoscopic 3D video chat over the Internet. It's the work of a unique camera called 'Minoru,' which has been tested and documented in a feature today. Be warned though: anaglyphic photography was clearly not invented to create comfortably-viewable videos."
Don't know about the rest of you, but I don't find anything 3D about additive red+blue channel images, and I find any advertisement of a "3D movie" annoying. Unless it's holo -- as seen on Star Trek viewscreens -- then that's not 3D, plain and simple.
And I also don't find anything innovative about this cam. How about "just" pairing two "regular" cams, and writing a virtual webcam driver that would merge the images into one? This Minoru is essentially the same thing, but packed in a £49.95 plast
What you said is absolutely correct, including the UTF-8 part. And BTW, if you meant to invoke the voice of comic book guy without mentioning him, you totally succeeded.:)
+1, especially since you have to wear the stupid glasses anyways, why not just pair 2 normal cams (ooh challenging), and have your main product being special glasses with a screen in each 'lens', then the glasses have a focus setting, which sends back to the webcams to change their focal point. Or get a little more complex and have the glasses monitor the viewers eyes, and interpret the desired focal distance and angle by that, then you could actually "look around" as if you were there, (having the ability
Probably because glasses with screens in them do two things. First they give people headaches after prolonged use of them unless you can see through the images or the images are peripheral instead of the focal point. The second thing is that you wouldn't be able to see the keyboard or other things on the desk when using the glasses like a normal web cam. It might make a fun toy but would severely limit the applications.
Actually, we can use the half-mirror sliver in a clear glass block like what you could find in old super-8 cameras to solve the problem of not being able to see the keyboard.
Good luck on solving the headache issue, though. The only thing i've found to work is to actually have a visor and lens assembly bigger than the Virtual Boy, and then we'd introduce the problem of neck strain due to the weight of the unit.
The problem with all 3d is that the lenses on the glasses must be calibrated to the colors on the display for optimal effect. For example if the images appear in the wrong shade of blue and red, you might begin to see both images in both eyes (no 3d).
With a properly calibrated display and some good quality glasses I'd bet the effect is quite good.
RIght you are. I forgot about those. That one is even reasonably priced. They don't say what the 3D resolution is though... probably half of what they quote as the resolution, which would make it 800x500ish.
I'm guessing this works by having two liquid crystal layers.
A liquid crystal layer has two states. in one state light passes through with no change to the polarization. In the other state, there is a 90 degree change in polarization.
So take a bog standard LCD monitor. Add a large single segment liquid crystal layer to the front. So this new layer has just one giant pixel, making it very inexpensive. (In reality for performance reasons you would probably use multiple smaller segments, but you don't need anyw
Now imagine that you have an ordinary house-cat, and two jars of marmalade.
You look at the house-cat first through one jar of marmalade, and then through another jar of marmalade, and then some bloody bastard named Shodillinger or something poisons the bloody house-cat with a hammer and a box.
The problem with all 3d is that the lenses on the glasses must be calibrated to the colors on the display
Slow down, cowboy...
There's many ways in which you can present stereographic content. Personally I prefer the side-by-side method as it allows for full color and no special display; and then specifically the cross-eyed method. This does take up twice the horizontal space; though for most webcam purposes you could re-orient the camera so that it records in a portrait projection, and you'd lose much less
Then they started putting out all these animated films in 3-D- Robots, Beowulf, Up, etc. And I kept paying the extra to see the 3-D versions. Something kept bothering me though. Then, in the middle of Up, I realized what it was: after about 10 minutes, I stopped noticing that it was 3-D at all. I mean, if you get really absorbed in a movie, you don't need it to be 3-D anyway... and frankly, 3-D images never look three dimensional like they do in the real world. They have an otherworldly quality that seems, at least to me, in some ways less natural than 2-D images. Maybe it's that they don't define the subtleties of the true three dimensional world well enough, I don't know. Half the time it almost seems like I'm looking at one of those paper cut-out toy theatres where there's several levels of depth, but everything on each level is flat and it's only the levels themselves that are spaced apart. Am I the only one who feels this way?
No, I agree with you. While I sort of like the 3D movies, I find myself removing the glasses frequently for two reasons. One, is the one you mentioned. The other is for some reason, my eyes water when I watch these movies. Instantly, as soon as the 3D actually starts, my eyes water. The first time I thought it was my allergies, but the next time we watched two movies back to back, and the first wasn't 3D, and my eyes were fine. As soon as we went into the second theater and I put the glasses on my eyes star
There's several reasons why you may not find them all that '3D'...
starting with the obvious: it's not 3D, it's stereographic. We still call that '3D' because you get depth cues from it and depth would be the third dimension.
also obvious: when you move your head, the perspective doesn't change. For 2D, your brain doesn't care so much* as it's been trained in seeing 2D images since you were born. Stereographic images however do fool your brain into getting a depth cue, and it assumes that because it gets depth cues, you should be able to get a different perspective by moving your head. This confusion fades after a short while (depends on the person), but it'll always be there. The worst thing is.. your eyes jitter, even if you keep your head perfectly still, your eyes will still be bouncing all over the place - with minute movements, but your brain still expects the minute differences in perspective it's used to from actual 3D environments.
less obvious: you get depth cues of, say, an object being up close... something silly like the sword in Beowulf... right at you through the screen. You look at it, essentially crossing your eyes a little like you would any object that gets closer to you.. but now something funny happens. Your eyes, when they cross, by virtue of the brain will try to focus at a depth of the intersection point of your two eyes*. However, the film is not -actually- 3D.. so you're at the mercy of whatever focus the film's producer decided upon. So if that tip of the sword is squarely out of focus, your brain sits there wondering what the $&#* is going on. This effect is not so pronounced for surfaces further away (much like a focal distance on your camera of 15m will happily cover 14m and 16m as well, and far beyond those; while a macro shot at 2cm distance requires very careful positioning of your camera's distance to the subject to get the correct part in focus... e.g. photographing an insect and trying to get its head, rather than some leg in focus) - but at the same time, depth cues get much less pronounced as surfaces get further away - simply as they converge with perspective.
There's a few other reasons, including keystoning of the projection (when seeing a stereographic 3D feature, try to sit as close to the center of the screen when projected out to the seating as possible), but the above are the main three.
It bugs me as well, but for some movies it's absolutely worth seeing the '3D' version.
* This is also the main reason why some people have issues trying to see side-by-side type stereographic images. Getting your eyes to see a surface at one distance (depending on how much you have to cross your eyes to make the two images overlap), while the lenses of each eye focus on another distance (the display surface) can be unnatural and some people simply never get it happening for them.
For kicks.. close your left eye, now with your right eye, try to focus on a nearer distance (without cheating using another surface). Do the same with the right eye closed and left eye open. If you can do this, you can probably watch side-by-side stereographic images (of the cross-eye method) easily. Now for your brain kicking in.. open both eyes, and try again. You'll find this difficult at best and impossible at worst - without, in fact, going cross-eyed.
Human visual system is fun - and that's without going into any optical illusion stuff:)
I can actually do that. Might be because at one point I took these classes that involved doing stereograms with increasing distance between the images to try and help my epilepsy or something.
Huh. I just found that I can move my eye's focus up and down individually (or at least reverse the movement for each eye). I wonder if I could get my eyes to swivel around like The End...
It's basically the Uncanny Valley theory, applied to 3D animation instead.
A compelling movie doesn't *need* to be seen in 3D. If it has a great plot, etc, then you'll enjoy it. I don't think any amount of technology will ever change that.
Still, when this technology ultimately comes to research and games it will really change things.
I hate those 3D movies. Mainly because they look exactly the same as the 2D movies because I have amblyopia, but I have to wear the annoying glasses over my regular glasses. I went to see Up in 3D as everyone else I was going with wanted to. Last time I'm doing that, it takes a lot of the enjoyment out of the movie. I remember hearing these 3D TV shows being advertised as a kid and being confused as I thought everything was already in 3D.
The local theater scheduled significantly more showings of the 3D ver
At least when converted to youtube the red and blue image wasn't even in-sync.
Perhaps a whole new compression algorithm.
The problem is the human senses are very sensitive to subtle changes - everything from phase changes in audio to things like frame sync. The original full motion simulator guys figured it out when they missed the motion tracking to video image by a frame or two - everyone got sick. Instant sea sickness.
Am I missing something, or is this just two ordinary webcams that superimpose their images onto one another? Why did it take so long for someone to duct tape 2 cameras together?
I've seen at least the approach of using 2 webcams pretty much as early as the first webcams existed.
Sadly no records easily found, but here's one from 2004 (well post-webcam-introduction-era, of course: http://www.callipygian.com/3dWebCam.htm [callipygian.com]
Note that there's one major problem with using 2 separate cameras; getting them to use the same settings. One might whitebalance/expose/etc. one way, the other another way, and poof... there goes the illusion.
Clearly I had to break out my red-blue anaglyph glasses and damn that video made my eyes and brain hurt.
The playback software has some glitches in it (not a youtube playback thing) because one image would freeze while the other eye would continue playing. They really need to fix that. The ad popup thing in youtube didn't help either.
It was good but a gimmick at best. Plus all my work colleagues looked at me weird with the glasses on until they realise what the hell I was doing. Then they came over for a gander. Who's cool now?
Using it to produce 3D video seems gimmicky and, as someone pointed out, who wants to look at everybody wearing 3D glasses? I think a better use would be to use the two cameras to allow calculation of distances and then replace everything beyond a certain distance. Sort of a green screen effect but without the green screen. Now that would be useful (and cool).
Anaglyph stereo requires two different images. These are taking two identical ones and shifting one of them a bit to one side. This does not work.
For instance, in the video, look at the table's border. You'll see how the red border is the same thickness, from the part that's closest to the viewer to the part that is furthest.
Compare this with an image that does it right [mtbs3d.com]. Notice how the difference between the left and right eye changes depending on distance. You can clearly see in the stairs how the red and
How long must I wait for OSX or Linux drivers for this thing? Should I just give up and make my own V4L filter that can color shift and merge two webcams into one? (should be easy, but do I want to glue to cameras together that badly)
My real question is, why don't they just give up on this 3D crap already?
Money.
Don't get me wrong - I love me some stereographic 3D (actual 3D is even nicer but well out of reach).
But the only motivator for 3D content right now is money. Money spent on 3D projection systems, the glasses, eventually special Blu-Ray (or beyond) features, displays (in the news a lot lately), cameras*, etc. etc.
Eventually stereographic 3D will become mainstream, as there's a -huge- push behind it. Eventually, smell-o-vision w
3D Webcam (Score:5, Funny)
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Don't know about the rest of you, but I don't find anything 3D about additive red+blue channel images, and I find any advertisement of a "3D movie" annoying. Unless it's holo -- as seen on Star Trek viewscreens -- then that's not 3D, plain and simple.
And I also don't find anything innovative about this cam. How about "just" pairing two "regular" cams, and writing a virtual webcam driver that would merge the images into one? This Minoru is essentially the same thing, but packed in a £49.95 plast
Re:3D Webcam (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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+1, especially since you have to wear the stupid glasses anyways, why not just pair 2 normal cams (ooh challenging), and have your main product being special glasses with a screen in each 'lens', then the glasses have a focus setting, which sends back to the webcams to change their focal point. Or get a little more complex and have the glasses monitor the viewers eyes, and interpret the desired focal distance and angle by that, then you could actually "look around" as if you were there, (having the ability
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Probably because glasses with screens in them do two things. First they give people headaches after prolonged use of them unless you can see through the images or the images are peripheral instead of the focal point. The second thing is that you wouldn't be able to see the keyboard or other things on the desk when using the glasses like a normal web cam. It might make a fun toy but would severely limit the applications.
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Actually, we can use the half-mirror sliver in a clear glass block like what you could find in old super-8 cameras to solve the problem of not being able to see the keyboard.
Good luck on solving the headache issue, though. The only thing i've found to work is to actually have a visor and lens assembly bigger than the Virtual Boy, and then we'd introduce the problem of neck strain due to the weight of the unit.
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Re:3D Webcam (Score:5, Funny)
I also thought about making a 1D camera joke, but figured, "what's the point?"
Parent
Re:3D Webcam (Score:5, Funny)
I also thought about making a 1D camera joke, but figured, "what's the point?"
Bad 1D geometry skill is where I draw the line.
Parent
Possibilities (Score:2, Insightful)
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Profit (Score:5, Insightful)
Step 2: Figure out how to use it to make porn
Step 3: make porn
Step 4: Profit!
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You missed a step.
Step 3.5: ???
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Step 3.5: ???
Meet women.
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If you're only meeting women in step 3.5, what the hell kind of porn were you making in step 3???
Prepare for a run in display calibration tools (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with all 3d is that the lenses on the glasses must be calibrated to the colors on the display for optimal effect. For example if the images appear in the wrong shade of blue and red, you might begin to see both images in both eyes (no 3d).
With a properly calibrated display and some good quality glasses I'd bet the effect is quite good.
Re:Prepare for a run in display calibration tools (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Prepare for a run in display calibration tools (Score:4, Informative)
Also polarized light and shutter glasses 3D. But you need a projector for the first one. Okay, two projectors.
Parent
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RIght you are. I forgot about those. That one is even reasonably priced. They don't say what the 3D resolution is though... probably half of what they quote as the resolution, which would make it 800x500ish.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm guessing this works by having two liquid crystal layers.
A liquid crystal layer has two states. in one state light passes through with no change to the polarization. In the other state, there is a 90 degree change in polarization.
So take a bog standard LCD monitor. Add a large single segment liquid crystal layer to the front. So this new layer has just one giant pixel, making it very inexpensive. (In reality for performance reasons you would probably use multiple smaller segments, but you don't need anyw
Re: (Score:2)
Now imagine that you have an ordinary house-cat, and two jars of marmalade.
You look at the house-cat first through one jar of marmalade, and then through another jar of marmalade, and then some bloody bastard named Shodillinger or something poisons the bloody house-cat with a hammer and a box.
How rude.
Re: (Score:2)
Slow down, cowboy...
There's many ways in which you can present stereographic content. Personally I prefer the side-by-side method as it allows for full color and no special display; and then specifically the cross-eyed method. This does take up twice the horizontal space; though for most webcam purposes you could re-orient the camera so that it records in a portrait projection, and you'd lose much less
This will fail at videoconferencing. (Score:4, Insightful)
Because everyone will have to be using 3d glasses.
Unless you make the 3d glasses somewhat invisible to the 3D camera and... ow my head!!
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Is it just me... (Score:3, Funny)
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Where's the brillo pad? I need to scour out my eyes.
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Man that is one home video of the honeymoon night I *don't* want to see.................
I used to be a big fan of 3-D... (Score:5, Insightful)
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No, I agree with you. While I sort of like the 3D movies, I find myself removing the glasses frequently for two reasons. One, is the one you mentioned. The other is for some reason, my eyes water when I watch these movies. Instantly, as soon as the 3D actually starts, my eyes water. The first time I thought it was my allergies, but the next time we watched two movies back to back, and the first wasn't 3D, and my eyes were fine. As soon as we went into the second theater and I put the glasses on my eyes star
Don't worry - you're not alone (Score:5, Insightful)
There's several reasons why you may not find them all that '3D'...
starting with the obvious: it's not 3D, it's stereographic. We still call that '3D' because you get depth cues from it and depth would be the third dimension.
also obvious: when you move your head, the perspective doesn't change. For 2D, your brain doesn't care so much* as it's been trained in seeing 2D images since you were born. Stereographic images however do fool your brain into getting a depth cue, and it assumes that because it gets depth cues, you should be able to get a different perspective by moving your head. This confusion fades after a short while (depends on the person), but it'll always be there. The worst thing is.. your eyes jitter, even if you keep your head perfectly still, your eyes will still be bouncing all over the place - with minute movements, but your brain still expects the minute differences in perspective it's used to from actual 3D environments.
less obvious: you get depth cues of, say, an object being up close... something silly like the sword in Beowulf... right at you through the screen. You look at it, essentially crossing your eyes a little like you would any object that gets closer to you.. but now something funny happens. Your eyes, when they cross, by virtue of the brain will try to focus at a depth of the intersection point of your two eyes*. However, the film is not -actually- 3D.. so you're at the mercy of whatever focus the film's producer decided upon. So if that tip of the sword is squarely out of focus, your brain sits there wondering what the $&#* is going on. This effect is not so pronounced for surfaces further away (much like a focal distance on your camera of 15m will happily cover 14m and 16m as well, and far beyond those; while a macro shot at 2cm distance requires very careful positioning of your camera's distance to the subject to get the correct part in focus... e.g. photographing an insect and trying to get its head, rather than some leg in focus) - but at the same time, depth cues get much less pronounced as surfaces get further away - simply as they converge with perspective.
There's a few other reasons, including keystoning of the projection (when seeing a stereographic 3D feature, try to sit as close to the center of the screen when projected out to the seating as possible), but the above are the main three.
It bugs me as well, but for some movies it's absolutely worth seeing the '3D' version.
* This is also the main reason why some people have issues trying to see side-by-side type stereographic images. Getting your eyes to see a surface at one distance (depending on how much you have to cross your eyes to make the two images overlap), while the lenses of each eye focus on another distance (the display surface) can be unnatural and some people simply never get it happening for them.
For kicks.. close your left eye, now with your right eye, try to focus on a nearer distance (without cheating using another surface). Do the same with the right eye closed and left eye open. If you can do this, you can probably watch side-by-side stereographic images (of the cross-eye method) easily.
Now for your brain kicking in.. open both eyes, and try again. You'll find this difficult at best and impossible at worst - without, in fact, going cross-eyed.
Human visual system is fun - and that's without going into any optical illusion stuff :)
Parent
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I can actually do that. Might be because at one point I took these classes that involved doing stereograms with increasing distance between the images to try and help my epilepsy or something.
Huh. I just found that I can move my eye's focus up and down individually (or at least reverse the movement for each eye).
I wonder if I could get my eyes to swivel around like The End...
I now have a migraine. Experiment aborted.
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No you're not alone.
It's basically the Uncanny Valley theory, applied to 3D animation instead.
A compelling movie doesn't *need* to be seen in 3D. If it has a great plot, etc, then you'll enjoy it. I don't think any amount of technology will ever change that.
Still, when this technology ultimately comes to research and games it will really change things.
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The local theater scheduled significantly more showings of the 3D ver
already in the wild (Score:2)
LiveJasmin has had 3D cameras for a few months now. (http://www.livejasmin.com/listpage.php?tags=girl+3dcam&type=40) [NSFW]
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The demo sucked (Score:2)
At least when converted to youtube the red and blue image wasn't even in-sync.
Perhaps a whole new compression algorithm.
The problem is the human senses are very sensitive to subtle changes - everything from phase changes in audio to things like frame sync. The original full motion simulator guys figured it out when they missed the motion tracking to video image by a frame or two - everyone got sick. Instant sea sickness.
All in all.
Really? This is the world's first? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Oh, and that girl still looks flat.
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I've seen at least the approach of using 2 webcams pretty much as early as the first webcams existed.
Sadly no records easily found, but here's one from 2004 (well post-webcam-introduction-era, of course:
http://www.callipygian.com/3dWebCam.htm [callipygian.com]
Note that there's one major problem with using 2 separate cameras; getting them to use the same settings. One might whitebalance/expose/etc. one way, the other another way, and poof... there goes the illusion.
tradition (Score:2)
Bah.
Mine eyes! They hurt! (Score:4, Insightful)
Clearly I had to break out my red-blue anaglyph glasses and damn that video made my eyes and brain hurt.
The playback software has some glitches in it (not a youtube playback thing) because one image would freeze while the other eye would continue playing. They really need to fix that. The ad popup thing in youtube didn't help either.
It was good but a gimmick at best. Plus all my work colleagues looked at me weird with the glasses on until they realise what the hell I was doing. Then they came over for a gander. Who's cool now?
I had my Livecam product doing this in 1996! (Score:2)
I had my Livecam product doing this in 1996! www.livecamserver.com
Stereo video is nothing new, and anaglyphic video is terrible.
There are some excellent stereo video codecs that have been developed over the years, I even experimented with a few designs.
Why use it for 3D? (Score:3)
Methinks (Score:2, Funny)
The demo video does it wrong (Score:2)
Anaglyph stereo requires two different images. These are taking two identical ones and shifting one of them a bit to one side. This does not work.
For instance, in the video, look at the table's border. You'll see how the red border is the same thickness, from the part that's closest to the viewer to the part that is furthest.
Compare this with an image that does it right [mtbs3d.com]. Notice how the difference between the left and right eye changes depending on distance. You can clearly see in the stairs how the red and
Linux and OSX? (Score:3, Interesting)
How long must I wait for OSX or Linux drivers for this thing? Should I just give up and make my own V4L filter that can color shift and merge two webcams into one? (should be easy, but do I want to glue to cameras together that badly)
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Money, dur (Score:2)
Money.
Don't get me wrong - I love me some stereographic 3D (actual 3D is even nicer but well out of reach).
But the only motivator for 3D content right now is money. Money spent on 3D projection systems, the glasses, eventually special Blu-Ray (or beyond) features, displays (in the news a lot lately), cameras*, etc. etc.
Eventually stereographic 3D will become mainstream, as there's a -huge- push behind it. Eventually, smell-o-vision w