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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

It's a shame Google killed Cardboard Camera. You could capture awesome stereo 3D panoramas using only your regular phone camera, back in 2015! It captured a little audio clip too, which is a nice touch. Viewing stereo content in VR that you took yourself is definitely qualitatively different from looking at a gallery of your photos on a screen.

Cardboard Camera can still be sideloaded from APKMirror. I don't know how to view the captures in VR these days, but I'm sure there's still some method.

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Shameless plug (my apologies it's my second this week ) - but we recently released our $80 headset. It's a plastic headset, with two bluetooth controllers, that you put your phone into 'Google Cardboard style'. We've released a Spatial TV app that lets you view spatial videos straight away. https://www.zappar.com/zapbox/

Quest can do that stuff in it's browser.

But I was never impressed with "VR" video and photography, it comes with most of the problems of Stereo 3D like fixed IPD and fixed perspective but adds more like stereo breaking whenever the viewer tilts their head.

Yeah I never saw much point in stereo content created by others due to the limitations you mention, and I wouldn't spend money on dedicated stereo capture devices. But Cardboard Camera costs $0, and it's a cool feeling to stand inside one of your own captures of a place you haven't been in a long time, or a place that doesn't exist anymore.

Someday soon we'll be capturing and viewing gaussian splat scenes and videos and that will be the point where 3D captured content really becomes compelling for VR (outside the adult niche).

I've never been too impressed by it either. On the other hand, a friend of mine got one of these live transmitting 360 degree camera devices that streams to your phone and lets you move your phone around to pan on the live feed... took it to Vegas with us and handed it up to dancers on stage in a club who handed it around while they were dancing above a crowd, and the results were ridiculously good. He's looking forward to spending his later years reliving highlights of his life in VR via these videos. Would be nice if they were stereo, I guess, but the 360 aspect is much more important.

I've never heard of those, what model was he using?

It's called an Insta360. Lots of fun. Using it... you stop thinking of it as a directional camera, and start thinking of it as a point in space. While it's streaming to your phone, you stand there and hold your phone in front of you and whichever way you turn the phone's inertial direction tracking syncs your screen to that part of the panorama. If that makes sense. As if you were just taking a photo of what's around you, except you're looking at what's around the 360 camera. And then while it's live, or later when you play it back, you can use your phone's tracking and zooming to shoot "normal" flat 2D videos inside of whatever it captured, sort of like you're there and you can shoot the scene all over again. The editing capability to me was kind of the killer feature... you don't need to worry about framing subjects. Six of us put it in the middle of the table during dinner, and later on cut a video that pans or jumps to whoever was talking.

It's also really low-key, because people don't know what it is, and it doesn't look like you're pointing a camera at them. Even though it's capturing everything around it. We were able to go all over a casino with it and no one on staff noticed.

This functionality is still there, it was integrated into the standard Google Camera on Pixel devices, as "Panorama". Also the pixel photo gallery has a view mode usable with cardboard style contraptions.

It doesn't make a stereo image pair though, does it? Wow, I do see that it has an option to capture audio, I had no idea that was there. Default off though.

It does. As I said, the gallery offers a cardboard style stereo view. The 2nd image is hidden in the jpeg file, just like the mp4 audio, and can be extracted using exiftool.

You sure? I just checked a panorama I took last month and the file does not contain the second image as far as I can tell using exiftool. I see the Cardboard viewing feature in the Photos app, however that doesn't mean the image is necessarily stereo. It looks to me like it's just displaying the same image for both eyes, rendered on the inside of a sphere at some default viewing distance.

It would surprise me if Google left the stereo feature enabled when it would double file sizes for something 99% of people would never use. But it would be nice if an option to enable it was exposed.

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