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jfizer
New Participant
May 8, 2013

Stereoscopic photography and image viewing.

  • May 8, 2013
  • 12 replies
  • 12968 views
Just wondering if this has been discussed so far.

Many years ago (90s) I worked with stereoscopic LCD shutter glasses and stereo pair images, both computer generated and photos. My initial development plan is to make an image viewing app for the Oculus Rift, where large resolution images (and image pairs) can be loaded and viewed by tilting the head and looking around (to get around the low resolution display in the Rift, images will be loaded at a 1 to 1 pixel ratio and the viewer can move their head around to see the full image).

It seems to me like there would be an obvious linkage between the Oculus products and stereoscopic photography, so a discussion of hardware and techniques could be interesting.

What I've been using is a Pentax digital SLR camera with a prism lens to split a single image into a stereo pair.

This works, but it has a fixed interocular distance so there is no control over the depth of field (the image viewer I am working on will allow you to shift an image pair left & right to manipulate the distance between them).

I've been thinking of getting a dual camera rig, but that gets expensive.

    12 replies

    jfizerAuthor
    New Participant
    May 8, 2013
    Attached is an example image that shows the problems with the method I've been using.

    The center divide is not straight due to the prism moving when the lens is adjusted. Likewise, the focus is off since it is hard to get the camera to focus on a point not centered in the view. The interocular distance between the left and right is also too great as the prism is not well suited for macro photography.

    IMGP0493.JPG

    On the plus side, it's a cheap method of 3D photography.
    mouja
    Participant
    May 8, 2013
    I'm really interest by your viewing app. I make all sort of high-resolution stereoscopic pictures, and I can't manage to see them properly with VR player or stereoscopic player. I still don't received my rift, but when I zoom with these two apps with the oculus viewing method, the picture is not magnified inside the curved frame, in the aim of contemplating every details using the head tracking. Instead, it's all the frame that's growing.
    I guess that your app should solve this, according to your explanations. tell me if I'm wrong please.

    here's a link for some high resolution samples (scenes of clouds that I'm impatient to be immersed inside with the rift) :
    http://littlebluebird.free.fr/cloud/

    the same pictures but very reduced (viewable with crosseyed method)






    jfizerAuthor
    New Participant
    May 9, 2013
    I've not looked into VR Player much as I use a Mac for my main computer, but I will be trying it out when I can. As for "stereoscopic player", is that the NVidia one? Likewise I've not used that much.

    However I've written such viewers and software many years ago when MS-DOS ruled the land and 64kb was "enough for anyone". So my hope is that my past experience can address the sort of issues you're talking about.

    I have not worked with the 3D format used by the Rift, having instead focused on frame or scan line sequential 3D for use with shutter glasses and Virtual-IO glasses. So we'll see what I can accomplish.
    mouja
    Participant
    May 9, 2013
    "Stereoscopic player" is not the Nvidia one. It's a famous video player, who manage very well many 3D formats , with a lot of viewing methods (and recently supported Oculus Rift - without head tracking).
    http://www.3dtv.at/products/player/index_en.aspx

    If I can be more explicit, I could tell that the ideal for my use would be a clone of Stereo Photomaker with Oculus support. Very fast, very intuitive, allowing zoom, and giving the possibility of loading the next/precedent picture easily.
    http://stereo.jpn.org/eng/stphmkr/index.html
    Maybe his creator, Masuji Suto, will update SPM one of these days.
    geekmaster
    Up and Coming
    May 10, 2013
    "mouja" wrote:
    ... If I can be more explicit, I could tell that the ideal for my use would be a clone of Stereo Photomaker with Oculus support. Very fast, very intuitive, allowing zoom, and giving the possibility of loading the next/precedent picture easily.
    http://stereo.jpn.org/eng/stphmkr/index.html
    Maybe his creator, Masuji Suto, will update SPM one of these days.
    It already supports SBS and barrel distortion correction, so you probably just need to figure out how to configure it for the Rift DK:
    http://stereo.jpn.org/eng/stphmkr/help/adjust_01.htm#barrel

    And it even does auto-alignment of image pairs, using thousands of SIFT points:
    http://stereo.jpn.org/eng/stphmkr/help/adjust_04.htm

    And it can even to spherical projection (which is great for some VR applications):
    http://stereo.jpn.org/eng/stphmkr/help/spheric.htm

    And it can even great stereoscopic snapshots using photos harvested from Google Earth:
    http://stereo.jpn.org/eng/stphmkr/help/ge.htm

    Not need to wait for any "Rift-compatibility" mods -- just learn how to configure it as it stands now...
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
    geekmaster
    Up and Coming
    May 10, 2013
    Stereo Photo Maker has a java viewer you can upload to your own web server, or here is a sample version:
    http://stereo.jpn.org/java/spva/stereowe.htm

    Select Parallel view (or press the SWAP button), then press the SPC button until the images are touching at the center, then press the L and R buttons to adjust the IPD until it is Rift-compatible. It does not support barrel distortion (pre-warp), but should still look pretty good in a Rift DK. SPM does support barrel distortion, so image pairs could be pre-warped using that, and then saved for online viewing.
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
    jfizerAuthor
    New Participant
    May 10, 2013
    Lots of good information here, always nice to see what others have done so I can see if I can improve on their work.

    The main thing I am getting from this is that the stereoscopic format for the Rift is very specific to the hardware. Has there been any discussion of adding support for other standard formats (field sequential for example)? I know that with the Virtual-IO glasses there was a hardware switch to pick the 3D input type, seems like it would be a good idea to support output from blu-ray players etc for the consumer version.
    mrburns
    Participant
    May 22, 2015
    Hi,

    is there any progress visible for this thread?
    I am also interested in taking images from a stereo camera rig and view it on an Oculus VR.

    - But how to get the correct barrel distortion?
    - How to apply (inverse) chromatic aberration to reduce chromatic aberration in the edges of the lenses?
    cybereality
    Inspiring
    May 22, 2015
    You can just map a stereo image to a floating quad in Unity or Unreal and you will get all the head-tracking, distortion and chromatic aberration correction for free.
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    mrburns
    Participant
    May 26, 2015
    Hi cybereality,

    thanks. Is there any way to print those images?
    I want to create stereo-cards and watch them on e.g. Google cardboard.
    From the Google cardboard I just use the lenses and created my own stereo-card-holder.
    Now I need the barreldistortion and correction for chromatic aberration for my images (left and right) to print it in 600dpi.

    1. I need the code (a link to the C++ file) which makes a 'normal' image into the barrel distorted one
    2. I need the code (a link to the C++ file) which creates the correction for chromatic aberration.

    Thanks again...
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