Forum Discussion
Thought experiment on stereo 3D and depthmaps
Hi Guys, I've been studying on how to make my own 360 stereo pictures and video. There are some great ones in Oculus Home on samsung Gear. used VR player and others to evaluate 180/360 stereo vid...
Yes, you can do this. It's called stereo reprojection, and was used (for example) to make Crysis 2 support 3D monitors. Basically it uses a single 2D image and a depth map to "reproject" the pixels into 3D space and adjust their appearance (for example, moving slightly to the side for a second camera view).
The main issue is with occlusions. For example. in a first person shooter, you would not see anything behind the gun in the original render, so once you make it stereo (even worse with head-tracking parallax) you will have a halo of blank pixels around the gun. There are different ways you can try to mask the issue by stretching pixels or using nearby textures/colors but it will be a noticeable artifact.
That said, you would have to weigh that against the artifacts you get with a static stereo cube map, namely that you can't roll your head, and that stereo becomes distorted the further away you look from the cardinal axes. So the occlusion halos may actually be a better choice in that respect, though it is a trade-off.
The main issue is with occlusions. For example. in a first person shooter, you would not see anything behind the gun in the original render, so once you make it stereo (even worse with head-tracking parallax) you will have a halo of blank pixels around the gun. There are different ways you can try to mask the issue by stretching pixels or using nearby textures/colors but it will be a noticeable artifact.
That said, you would have to weigh that against the artifacts you get with a static stereo cube map, namely that you can't roll your head, and that stereo becomes distorted the further away you look from the cardinal axes. So the occlusion halos may actually be a better choice in that respect, though it is a trade-off.