Researchers Develop Genuine 3D Camera 96
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."
BS... (Score:2, Insightful)
More of the same, just stereoscopic on steroids (Score:2, Insightful)
Unless it's doing a lot of moving around, it's just stereoscopic on steroids. If it stays in a fixed position, even though it has more than two cameras, all the objects are at fixed points. Until it can accurately judge the height, width and depth of an object without faking it in reconstruction, or making an educated guess - it's just more of the same. Humans suffer from the same limitations, but they fix this by moving the viewpoint around until a coherent 3D image is constructed.
Unless you have cameras that can accurately measure objects and move in the X and Y dimensions enough to cover the entire scene and all viewpoints for a given object, you're stuck in the same position - educated guessing.
Re:Quick question (Score:5, 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.
Re:Quick question (Score:5, 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.
Lausanne is in Switzerland (Score:4, Insightful)
No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Words mean things.