Step inside your photos with Cardboard Camera | Hacker News Reader

Step inside your photos with Cardboard Camera

googleblog.blogspot.com

52 pointsmodeless16 comments

According to a friend's analysis, this appears to be using a rather ingenious dual slit-scan technique where it's gathering the leftmost and rightmost columns of pixels from the CMOS as the phone is turned, and then using the offsets between these columns against the two scans to re-create parallax. Fascinating stuff.

This looks like a great inside-out 3D scanner.

Meanwhile, MS is working on a mobile-phone outside-in scanner :)

http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/24/9199469/microsoft-turns-ip...

I've taken "non-3d" panoramas and viewed them in Cardboard, and that was cool enough. It is certainly the best way that currently exists to share the experience of being somewhere with someone else. I can't wait to try this out; I expect the addition of depth will make it that much more amazing.

I played with the new app yesterday. It works fairly well, generating 3D from camera motion (you slowly pan the camera).

The resolution did not seem very good, but the effect is nice. Someone had a good idea.

I'm a little confused. Do you need some kind of smart phone holder that has a slot for your phone and lenses in front of each eye? If so, where do you get that?

"Google Cardboard."

Verizon is handing them out free right now, as a promo with Star Wars.

The New York Times sent them free to every Sunday subscriber, a few weeks ago.

Amazon has them, too. Also, here:

https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/get-cardboard/

Thanks!

It works surprisingly well, but it has a very limited vertical extent (based on how wide your phone camera is) and that limits the scenes it is suited for.

Is there an iOS equivalent to this yet?

Check out http://optonaut.co

Gonna have to check this out later and see how the viewing part works on the Rift. I'm guessing it'll come down to viewing the images with the proper alignment on the desktop/browser-based photo viewing app. If you can pull them up fullscreen with a side-by-side layout it ought to work fine.

They don't make it easy to do what you're asking.

Mostly because it's a panorama. Also because it's a single jpg, but it only shows the left eye. The right eye data is embedded as a BASE64 encoded JPEG that is stored in the XMP data of the image. Yup.

Yeah, I figured that out the un-fun way. Hopefully someone makes a wrapper or something the way they have for other panoramic images or street view. You can fullscreen a side-by-side 3d image and view on the Rift but you'd need something to translate it to that format and map positional tracking.

Gah, not available in your country. Lame, why do they do that...

Cool, but why does it need permission to access my microphone?

Because it optionally records ambient audio to play while looking at your panorama.

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