Comment by ohadron

11 years ago

Youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANSjwWomIJ8

Very cool idea. I could think of some indoor applications for it.

For outdoors, since the distance between the cameras and the object they're looking at is so far, and the distance between the two eyes is so close the difference between the two images is almost meaningless. I'd put the two cameras further apart and see what happens.

I remember looking through this thing: http://eyestilts.com/intro.html at Burningman many years ago - it makes things look very un-real - much like tilt-shift photos. I suspect it might become pretty disorienting to fly using such odd optics...

  • The lens in this device are pretty close to the looking subject. If you have cameras with a wider separation on a drone they'll be farther asay from the subjects and the effect will be less extreme, they are also very difficult to mount with 3 meters of separation.

    • Use two GPS guided quadcopters, each with their own camera. Problem solved, and now you can dynamically vary the intensity of the depth perception.

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  • That device is awesome! I would love to try it. It would be fairly simple to simulate the effect in any game with VR goggles.

    A really weird effect I've tried is to reverse the images each eye sees. I did this (first unintentionally, then deliberately) with my 3D television. It inverts the depth perception, so a small object in the foreground looks like it's sunken deep into the background. But mostly it's just confusing and stressful on the eyes, since there's presumably no evolutionary preparation to make sense of such visual input. Someone should make a physical optical device to offer this effect in the real world (it probably already exists).

Our drone couldn't really fit anything wider, so we went with the average human IPD according to the rift SDK. You're right, at distance it's of no use. Closeup, as we tried to illustrate with the pole, it helps. Aligning the cheap CMOS cameras were hard, though.