| Author | Message | ||
     David Sykes Rating: N/A |
I have recently been running the version of glPanorama modified for stereo by Michal Husak. Under Windows 2000 on a Soft-quadro modified GeForce2 GTS the Mars Pathfinder images (suggested by ToxicX) are impressively displayed. (though there is erratic flashing with the infra-red Revelators,the usual problem and nothing to do with glPanorama. Strangely, it is solved by zooming-in quite a lot). The theory suggests it is difficult to take your own stereo panoramas (I have taken ordinary ones). Has anyone made any progress with this ? | ||
| ToxicX Rating: N/A |
Here is some more info: http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/stereographics/stereopanoramic/ General about panorama: http://www.panoguide.com/ There are a lot of scietific articles/papers out there about stereoscopic panoramas, I lost the link to a decent search engine, but if you want to look into it, check your local collage library and ask for help, they'll get the papers for you. Tell me if you find one that focuses on how to take the actual photographs. | ||
| David Sykes Rating: N/A |
Thanks, I knew of Paul Bourke's site but not the reference you have given (which is fairly recent). Fascinating, but 360-off 1-degree images ! Easy in the virtual world of PovRay :-) My local library (in Wales) will order any published paper for 50p so will bear that in mind. Can't help feeling 'academic' solutions will be complicated and expensive. | ||
| M.H. Rating: N/A |
Just a notice: my glPanorama was optimized for ancient graphic card with low wideo memory. On graphic card with 4098x2048 textures (Quadro DCC and Quadro 4) or even 4098x4098 (Wildcat VP) the problem could be solved much more easy ... I am jut workin on a bit more advanced problem: stereoscopic panormamtic movie. The main problem is that nobody has any idea how to record it ... CG generation looks like th eonly one way ... Anothe problem is the power of existing computers - PIV at 2.5GHz can handle aprox 2000x1000 movie res at 25 fps, but we need more ... | ||
| David Sykes Rating: N/A |
ToxicX, Paul Bourke's PovRay Cathedral image is particularly impressive and my Revelator glasses don't misbehave at all with it ! I think I will download PovRay, learn to use it and then see what happens as you increase the field-of-view from 1 degree. Michal, luckily I downloaded your modified glPanorama some time ago. For many months I have not been able to access any links referring to yourself. | ||
| ToxicX Rating: N/A |
Well if you do make some panoramas with povray, say from ready-made scenes you download, I hope you can post them here, or I can out them on Stereovision.net there isnt much panoramic images to view out there. http://www.povray.org/ Sample scenes: http://www.povray.org/resources/links/POV-Ray_Include_Macro_and_Object_Files/Object_and_Scene_Files/ http://ftp.kreonet.re.kr/pub/tools/graphics/povray/scenes/ Here are converters that can export to povray from other formats: http://www.tb-software.com/ http://www.povray.org/resources/links/3D_Programs/Conversion_Utilities/ I hope you have the time to create some cool panoramas, if its easy to setup, write down how and I can render some too, but povray isnt known for user friendlyness... There is sticher software that can deal with the 1 degree output (I think), http://www.panoguide.com/ writes about panotools that is free and versatile, again not so user-friendly, like all advanced tools are. ----------------------- Michal, I have seen 360 sphere cameras that use dual 180 fisheye lenses, maybe using dual cameras to record spheres for 2 eyes might work, although new problems like how to hide the cameras from each other or correct stereo perspetive when using fisheye lenses might be more or less easy to solve... Would kick ass for HMDs, its like a movie that you are inside, cant move around, but 360 look around in a moving environment would be cool. Check out the demos here: http://www.ipix.com/ there are visible seams where the dual fisheyes meet, I also think that IPix holds a patent for stiching together a 360 sphere from 2 180 pix... About panorama cameras, maybe the most well known camera mfgs Hollywood use might have something buried in its files, from some old tests or 1960 movies. There is an old standard that used 3x movie screens side-by-side, not 360, but 3x(2.35:1) is very wide... | ||
| ToxicX Rating: N/A |
Hmm, looks like there are people out there trying to create a panoramic camera: S. Tzavidas and A.K. Katsaggelos, "Multicamera Setup for Generating Stereo Panoramic Video," Proc. 2002 SPIE Conference on VCIP, San Jose, CA, Jan. 2002. Again, doing a search in a college library and asking around Hollywood camera pros might present other solutions. Michal, time to write some patents? | ||
| ToxicX Rating: N/A |
Forgot to add the link to http://ivpl.ece.nwu.edu/Research/Panoramic/index.shtml about the last post, which has the email to Stavros Tzavidas, stzav@ece.northwestern.edu and a little more info. | ||
| M.H. Rating: N/A |
Toxic: I am familiar with the 360 camerea system ... Unfortunately 2 of them are absolutly not able to record a stereo-video movie. You will get zero eye separation in 2 directions , variable eye separation in the rest ... I am fully familar with the IPIX system as well - i was implementing IPIX viewer for VFX3D (work for IISVR) ... I have only 3 ideas how to record stero video panorama : 1) 2 very fast rotating camera montage 2) A lot of pairs of 2 cameras in some sort of circle montage ... Hudge mathematic post processing anyway ... 3) Some system of mirros collecting the nessesry images on one big CCD detector ... Use such move for HMD - that is exacly what I want to do, headtracking + placing the user in the stereo scene ... According my WWW accces: It is realy a disastar, no trick from me to make my codes not available. I had 1 hacking coused system crash and 2 HW caused system crash. Working on it ... Anybody needing something from my WWW send me an e-mail. I will try to do what I can ... Unfrotunately the steo-vidoe movies are to bigg ... | ||
| ToxicX Rating: N/A |
OK, how about this cool gadget called "Kaidan 360° One VR" reviewed here: http://www.steves-digicams.com/2002_reviews/360one.html I guess using 2 of them means the usual problem for stereo panoramas... | ||
| M.H. Rating: N/A |
Toxic: The Kaidan 360 is a nice toy for eventual panormatic 2D movie recording ... Unfortunatrly for no use for stereo-panorama recording. In the line in with the second camera is found you will: 1) See the second camera 2) Get zero eye separation ... Some device simulating fast rotating human head shuld be probably constructed to get what we need ... What about of a circel of e.g. 10 pairs of 2 cameras (20 total). Pairs rotated 36 deg on a circle montage :-). Nice monstrosity but it could theoreticaly work ... I can try to make some simple model of such device from USB cameras ... I had no problem to conect multiple USB cameras to one PC and mix theyr signal real time to a stream during my DirectShow coding experiments ... USB HUB with 6 connectors, 3 pairs of cameras monted on a circle as the minimum and it shuld work ... Maybe this idea iw worth a patent :-) | ||
| Alexander Oest Rating: N/A |
Hi Michal You write: "I had no problem to conect multiple USB cameras to one PC and mix theyr signal real time to a stream during my DirectShow coding experiments ... " I tried with two webcams, but was unable to find appropriate software for capturing both streams. What did you use? Were your webcams identical? If so, didn't you have problems with the computer not knowing which was which? Alex | ||
| M.H. Rating: N/A |
I use my software based on Microsoft DirectX 8.1 SDK examples and Intel Image Procesing library examples ... I was testing both identical webacam, webcams from different manufactures (Philips, UMAX) or even combination of 2 DV cameras conected through fireware (Sony TRV310 E and one another SONY model) ... Computer has no problem - each camera WDM source filter has unique number ... Every combination was working in both "save output to file mode (+ compress on the fly to anything)" and "make direct stero visualisation on the screen mode" . I did not tested "show and save" or "broadcast to internet" but it will probably work as well ... Unfortunatly the code is in a stage in witch you need havy DirectShow knowlidge to use it. Finalization to user friendly form depeneds on comercial interest for this solution, I am just overhelmed by the work on the DepthQ stereo video playback project now ... But I thing that there will be comercial interest - stereo microsocopy, medicinal stereo endoscopy or even direct stereo movie recording from 2 DV sources + on the fly stereo recorded scene preview .. | ||
| David Sykes Rating: N/A |
Toxic, thanks for those very useful PovRay links. I have downloaded PovRay and used it to render a 'molecule' generated by another package I found called PovChem. I guess if I simply rotate the PovChem model and render again I will have a stereo pair. I don't intend learning a lot about PovRay but it seems a useful way of moving a 'camera' around a scene and varying the stereo effect, particularly for stereo panoramas where I can see you need a series of unique viewpoints and hence use a 1 degree image. What I cannot see is what happens when the field-of-view is far larger as in 'real' lenses and why they don't work. PovRay should tell me. | ||
| Anonymous Rating: N/A |
About the 20 camera 3D panorama setup, shouldn't be too hard to build a "thing" holding say 20 DV cameras together, and find some rental shop and ask for 20 identical DV cams, but the rental fees might be high... The fun begins with syncing video from 20 sources and turning them into a single stereo panorama. Making a panorama photo out of 10 images takes time (seconds, even minutes) using the software that is out there now, so making panorama video would require either a LOT of time or a simpler way of stiching together the sources, with lower quality. Any ideas about the post-processing? | ||
| ToxicX Rating: N/A |
The previous post about the 20 cam comments was mine, pressed the wrong button... David, I was hoping that you would render some stereo panoramas with the info from http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/stereographics/stereopanoramic/ but maybe the exmples dont port that easy to other scenes? | ||
| M.H. Rating: N/A |
ToxicX: According ideas for post procesing : I know how to combine signal from unlimited number of cameras and save it as one big video streem ... Only the CPU power is a problem ... I quess that existing CPU can do that for 4-6 cameras .. It can be enoug for first experiments ... Mathematic post procesing should be trivial. You will have to do the standard panorama stitching thing with the firt frame manualy and this will give you the correct math for all the frames in the stream ... you will make de-facto calulation of all the wraping constants by procesing the fires frame and using the simlar constants on the rest will do the job ... If it will not work fully (probaly for moving stereo-panorama camera)) I thing that the AI of image analysis routines will be enought clever to compensete this ... I will probably do following very soon :-) : Go to nearest PC shop. Buy 6-10 Philips USB camera ($60 USD one) . Buy one big USB HUB with 6-10 inputs (It must be an USB1 -> USB2 hub becouse the USB1 conenction to PC will be a bottleneck. Do the circle montage, use my SSE2 instruction optimized IntelImageProcesing based DirectShow combination filter to store the input of all this cameras to one AVI stream (probably using some low Y4Cb1Cr1 color space based compression). Study the source codes witch I have availabe concerning image stitching and wraping (based on Fourier transofrmations and several similar funny thing, I am working in this area proffesional on electron microsocpy images analysisi) and encode the aligment/wrapping reprocesing code ... Sell the technolgy to Hollywod for BIG MONEY :-)... Get robbed later by somebody reading this message running just to patent this idea :-( Or shuld I forget the idea and go somwhere with my girlfriend :-( ? |
