Stanford Team Developing Super 3D Camera

Tookis writes "Most of us are happy to take 2D happy snaps with single lens digital cameras. Imagine if you had a digital camera that could more accurately perceive the distance of all objects in its field of vision than your own eyes and brain. That's exactly what a team of researchers from Stanford University are working on — and it could even be affordable for ordinary consumers."

Closely related recent development from Adobe?

[neocrono]

This sounds like sort of a flip of what Adobe announced recently with their "compound eye" camera lens [audioblog.fr]. The benefit with that, I suppose, is that you'd be able to use your existing camera body provided the lens had the right adapter.

It looks like here we've got an image sensor that would allow you to use your own lens, again provided that whatever camera body it found its way into had the right adapter. They also mention that it doesn't necessarily need an objective lens, though, and that's interesting...

Lightfields

[ka9dgx]

The work they've been doing on lightfields is pretty innovative. I first heard about this when Robert Scoble interviewed [podtech.net] Marc Levoy [stanford.edu] and got some cool demos into the video. I've done some lightfield experiments [flickr.com] with my trusty Nikon D40, it's interesting to see what new ideas [flickr.com] you can come up with for using a camera once you get into it.

Research paper

[FleaPlus]

For anyone interested in more than the press release, here's a link to their paper [stanford.edu], "A 3MPixel Multi-Aperture Image Sensor with 0.7m Pixels in 0.11m CMOS."

Existing 3D technology

[TheMCP]

Before everyone gets excited over 3D porn, I think we should consider existing 3D technology, and how this differs.

Stereographic imagery has existed since before the creation of the camera. 3D cameras have undergone several bouts of popularity. As a child, I remember my grandfather getting out his ancient 3D camera, and my father had a 3D adapter for his regular camera. 3D lenses are now available for digital SLRs [loreo.com], and if you are interested in video, you can even get a box that converts 2D TV to 3D TV in realtime [yahoo.net]. (Note: CRT TV required. That aside, I've got one, and it works much better than I expected.)

Among the advantages of the system they're describing in the article we're discussing is that it actually has depth information for everything in the image, and using that, it can either be used for measurements or to pick out things in the image at specific depths. It also can be done with one lens, so the 3D image can be rotated while preserving the 3D effect. With conventional stereo imagery, you have to use 2 lenses, and if you turn the camera sideways to take the picture, you can only ever look at it sideways afterward.

In all, I think this new system sound like a great advance and I hope they'll license it cheaply so it can become widely used.

Re:Not Necessarily New

[kilraid]

There are pictures shot with the Stanford prototype, and they date back to 2005! Oh and be gentle with the 74 MB video...

http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera/ [stanford.edu]