Disney Research Creates Megastereo - Panoramas With Depth 48
mikejuk writes "Disney Research has made a breakthrough in implementing the technique of acquiring depth information from a simple camera scan of a scene. For a perfect panorama you need to rotate the camera around its optical center, i.e. just rotate the camera. However, if you just rotate the camera about itself you don't get any parallax effects — which is why it makes the stitching together easier. If you want to get 3D information from the sequence of shots you need parallax. This means rotating the camera mounted on an offset arm or just moving the camera along an arc in your outstretched hand. The big problem with this method is that the parallax makes it more difficult to fit the mosaic together, and this is the problem that the research team has been working on. Using a range of different scanning methods the results can be converted into high resolution panoramas automatically complete with 3D information."
Very old news (Score:5, Insightful)
It's based on this invention: http://www.vision.huji.ac.il/stereo/
Yael Pritch (who was involved in this project in Disney) was also involved in this research in the Hebrew University.
So it's a breakthrough, but a very old one and, more importantly, somebody else's