Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

It has nothing on this

https://www.kandaovr.com/Obsidian-Pro

Panoramic photography for VR is on my bucket list although I have a huge list of other projects such as having a reliable camera-to-audience system for stereograms I shoot with another other camera from that company

https://www.kandaovr.com/qoocam-ego

Note there are cheap pano cameras too

https://www.kandaovr.com/qoocam-3

though my Uni has a resource center for that kind of thing and I can probably talk my way into borrowing one of the better ones.

Stereo panos can be absolutely amazing on a consumer VR headset, I've greatly enjoyed crowd scenes from Paris such as in front of the Louvre and an observation deck on the Eiffel tower.

The 3d economy more fundamentally needs some kind of photo-to-3d technology and that is going to take multiple photographs from different angles, a depth camera helps but in one shot it does not give you the pixels that are only visible on the L or the R channel in a stereogram because of obscuration.

I've got a friend who makes 3-d models using a $265 million camera

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111915448546172624

one thing we've talked about is where to get the missing pixels that aren't in any of the photographs, it's a tougher problem for him as a scientist than it is for me because he can't make stuff up.

"Nothing on this" is an interesting way to put it. Two 8,160 x 7,200 large sensors has various pros and cons compared to eight APS-C 24 MP sensors. If you want panoramic field of view, the latter is awesome. If you want high resolution for stereo in a particular direction, you'd want the former.

The market has shown over and over again that viewers are indifferent to stereo movies. Sure I will watch an awful Star Wars movie on my Quest just because it is in 3d but I am just about the only one.

Pano content in VR really is something new.

Apple's lack of vision with the Vision Pro is shocking as is the arrogance that somehow a $3k headset will revive interest in something people wouldn`t pay an extra $5 for at the movies.

With twice the memory and a desktop grade processor the AVP could trash the Quest 3 at immersive application but Apple is stuck on a backwards and conservative vision of mobile apps floating in the air - totally mundane sci-fi (Washuu had this in Tenchi Muyo) but a $3k headset has to do all, not just what one rich dude thinks is stylish.

If you are doing any VR or AR work you realize memory for textures is terribly short and 'more pixels' is the road to nowhere.

this camera is also used to create immersive environments, not only for watching "movies"

The Alicia Keys demo in AVP is not a "stereo movie" and people didn't have the opportunity to hang with their favorite celebs in what feels like reality.

Lots of as-well-made-as-able 3D "stereo" movies in Disney etc that work on AVP beautifully. None of those are the same "you are here now" sense as the Alicia Keys demo.

Agree with you on Apple's seeming reluctance to empower a new UX/UI for the AVP affordances. Having a multi-window iPad strapped to your face is less compelling. Over the past 15 years one notices how much of iOS UI was invented by the market (pull down to refresh, for instance). Perhaps they want to see what people come up with for this.

> Perhaps they want to see what people come up with for this.

Not going to happen without jailbreaking the locked-down VisionOS.

Apple could choose to enable for 18 months, then integrate the best use cases into the platform.

What would jailbreaking allow that couldn't be mocked up in AR mode instead of iPads-strapped-to-face mode?

Yes, you'd have to have your various "apps" in your same "suite" app (like Microsoft ships Word, Excel, Powerpoint, inside Office for iPadOS), but third party apps wouldn't know your new UX/UI paradigm anyway.

Integration with 3rd party devices, which Apple is refusing to do in the EU?

The market hasn't really shown that. It has shown that viewers are indifferent to FAKE 3-D movies, which is what studios troweled out as fast as they could... ruining a major opportunity.

Most people have seen maybe three real 3-D movies from among: the Avatars, a Pixar movie, Hugo, The Hobbit, the Transformers one where they tore up Chicago, and... yeah, I'm hard-pressed to name another movie right now that was shot in 3-D... oh, and Drive Angry. Which no one saw.

The vast majority of movies offered in "3-D" were post-processed junk.

Dune 1 3D is fantastic. If you customize the Vision Pro’s light shield to put the screens closer & expand field of view, even better: you are essentially in the movie.

Can you tell me more about pano content? What does that mean?

Those two products are doing totally different jobs. This is great for events, VR, and so on.

The BlackMagic design is aimed squarely at cinema use, where BM is already one of the industry standard platforms for color grading and increasingly for editing, and already highly respected for image acquisition. This matters because film distribution agreements increasingly mandate specific technologies for production to mitigate the risk of customer complaints abouts image quality.

The 3d part of the camera is somewhat relevant for the cinema release market (and VR headset users who want to watch a movie in 3d...but I think this will remain a small market because wearing a helmet/goggles to watch a movie is inherently anti-social), but even if you never plan to release in 3d it's nice to be able to acquire that way for vfx purposes. Recording ground truth 3d information during acquisition is always going to be superior and cheaper to inferring it computationally from a monocular image.

Having a user stuck in the center of the scene is what kills immersion in my opinion, but at the same time I develop free navigation systems for VR :)

I have a QoocamEgo and have found it pretty disappointing even at that price point. It takes about 30 seconds to start up, chews through battery quickly, and has poor autofocus. I set focus manually by guessing and then use "sport mode" (1/120second) otherwise it will use low shutter speeds which produce motion blur handheld. Also, even though it will shoot close up items, I've found that the offset is too great for most viewing scenarios. So, I would say composing images that include subjects 3m to infinity is about the best.

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