Stereoscopic 360 still panorama capture

[mediavr]

I thought I would start a thread specifically on real world stereoscopic 360 still panorama capture and viewing. First some links:

There is a Google+ group for users of a stereo still pano Android app Stereospheres. It is by Chris Dickerson who has details on capture as well as being the author of the app. He now has a GearVR and says he might start developing for that.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities ... 2409327827

There is a Facebook group "3Dsteropanoramas" (French/English)
http://www.facebook.com/groups/3dstereopanoramas

There are some analog 360 stereo panorama camera systems but they can only be used for stereo cylinders not spheres. The best known is the twin ROUNDSHOT Super 220VR with stereo attachments.
http://www.roundshot.com/documents/Roun ... e_Skin.pdf
An early pioneer of analog 360 stereo panorama cameras is Michel Dusariez: http://goo.gl/QvMtzg

There are some digital stereo pano scanning systems too but mostly they are used for robotics navigation and capture depth maps as well as visual 360s and dont have much vertical FOV. I will find some links.

I have a stereo pano blog: http://www.stereopanoramas.com (somewhat moribund but has some links and technical information as well as samples)

VRWiki has useful links on stereo panoramas playback (as well as CG stereo panos, lightfields etc)
http://vrwiki.wikispaces.com/3D+Rendering

There is a book on panoramic line sensor cameras with chapters on stereo panoramas
http://www.amazon.com/Panoramic-Imaging ... 0470060654
There is also this book: Panoramic Vision: Sensors, Theory and Applications
http://goo.gl/LQ4ahS

Disney research: Megastereo: Constructing High Resolution Stereo Panoramas
http://www.disneyresearch.com/project/megastereo/ ... see also
http://www.disneyresearch.com/publicati ... ra-arrays/

Re nadir/zenith stitching problems see
http://www.trentgrover.com/images/tech/ ... oyComp.pdf (his nadir/zenith stitching anaglyphs example has swapped captions I think)

High resolution stereo panos (real world and rendered) are used a lot in virtual heritage applications. For example -
http://vcc.kaust.edu.sa/Pages/Pub-Cult- ... -Nile.aspx

Stereo panoramas as virtual sets: http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments ... eo_motion/

Iximage style three camera "omnipolar" layouts can be used for stereo panorama still capture as well as video. Recent ultra fisheyes like from Entapano and multi-Gopro sync solutions from Mewpro make this a more versatile solution as coverage expands beyond hemispheric.
http://forums.oculus.com/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=9922
http://www.entapano.com/en/l/index.html
http://mewpro.cc/category/mewpro/

The Spaceshot: a stereo panorama pre-digital virtual reality viewing system
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/photo-3d/message/85081
http://goo.gl/Fstggj
" As I recall the device was on a plinth and you walked
around it while peering into a stereo viewer which had a geared mechanism which
propelled the film at the speed appropriate to your movement. The immersive
impression was supposed to be very strong and it was expensive!
> You are describing the "Spaceshot" (initially called "Pan3D") - an immersive
3D viewing system designed by Jerry Kew of Leicester England. This however is
much more recent - dating from 1993. Although there was a display model built
as you describe, a handheld version was also available that had a built-in
gyroscope.
> A lot of money was put into this project and Seitz even built a stereo
panoramic camera for it. Unfortunately, the system ended up being way too
costly with cameras at $20,000. and viewers at $5000. each. In fact, film
cartridge modules cost about $1800. each !
> Even though the backers were hoping to sell the system to a large US
corporation involved in the real estate industry, the deal never happened and
the project was abandoned.>
> Francois

Video characters in virtual reality stereo panoramas
http://www.icinema.unsw.edu.au/projects/conversations/
(I shot the stereo panoramas for this)

Depth maps from vertical stereo pano pairs -- a Kolor research project
http://www.kolor.com/2012/09/07/kolor-l ... dre-jenny/

more to come ...

[mediavr]

Here is a recent post I made on the stereopanoramas Facebook group about my new modified Gopro stereo pano capture setups:

Lately I have been experimenting with rapid capture with spinning modified Gopro3+ Blacks (with 180+ lenses) rigs. Like this 3 camera one, where I have it set up on a pano head for calibration purposes.

http://www.mediavr.com/stereopanoramas/90mmrig.jpg

The outer pair of cameras are synced with the Dual Hero System and the inner camera, which is used for calibration in spin mode, is synced by audio or visual means. I use small gearhead motors for spinning the cameras around. With smaller interaxials like 50mm I use a two camera rig with one camera rotating on the NoParallaxPoint (used for calibration) and the other an outrigger. I build the rigs so the cameras are located precisely in the rig and the only subsequent calibration needed is the rotation and not the inter-camera relation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFSeAdb9Kvs

With a 5 second rotation like in the video you need good light otherwise the Gopro exposure will be too long.
I made another rotator especially for slower exposures and that can do up to 1 minute rotations by changing the batteries.

A 15 second rotation is long enough for bright interiors. Here are a couple of 50mm interaxial stereo panos with 15 second rotation. The Over/Under versions look good with LiveViewRift in the DK2. They are stitched from about 360 frames per camera. Sometimes I discard half the frames but these have close detail so I used them all.
Here are the links to the full size versions:

Strand Arcade Over/Under http://www.mediavr.com/stereopanoramas/strandou.jpg
Strand Arcade anaglyph: http://goo.gl/GfWM2u
Greenhouse Over/Under http://www.mediavr.com/stereopanoramas/ ... seou1s.jpg
Greenhouse anaglyph: http://goo.gl/c4ap04

[mediavr]

Here are some links etc on stereo still 360 panorama viewing options:

For DK2 there is LiveViewRift and Whirlygig --- I use LiveViewRift mostly but it is harder to get your head around initially

http://soft.viarum.com/liveviewrift/
viewtopic.php?f=28&t=11001
I wrote a tutorial on LiveViewRift:
http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments ... ple_1803d/

Whirlygig
https://share.oculus.com/app/whirligig- ... r---player

For GearVR there is no support for stereo still 360 panoramas yet afaik -- currently you have to convert them to short movies with limited resolution. John Carmack has been working on stereo still panorama support for GearVR:
https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/statu ... 4426112001
https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/statu ... 5636860928

Unity3d with version 5 has now put most of the Pro features into a free unified version
http://unity3d.com/get-unity
The improved texture mapping options in a free Unity make it an attractive prospect for stereo pano viewer creation I think and I have been trying to do stuff with it.
http://ak-hdl.buzzfed.com/static/2014-1 ... 0930-8.jpg

There is this great tutorial on stereo panoramas in Unity
http://bernieroehl.com/360stereoinunity/

Btw I found the default Unity sphere is too blocky and I am using a free Unity octahedron sphere
http://www.binpress.com/tutorial/creati ... sphere/162

I have bought a couple of Unity addons -- mainly Cinema Suite
http://cinema-suite.com/
-- which has stereo features supporting anaglyph, interlaced, and SBS viewing.
-- also I bought a camera mapping addon that supports spherical projection
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/16133
my idea being for that to put a seamless floor plane in the scene for Cinema Suite Kinect captured CG characters to walk on

I have a 4k passive 3D tv on loan -- you can use 4K TVs as giant monitors at full resolution if you have a supporting card and newer HDMI cable -- ie. nvidia 970 and above - so this is one of my plans for Cinema Suite -- to make a Unity interactive 3d pano viewer in interlaced mode for that display. I have it almost working but dont have the card for full 4K.

Scrolling smoothness and image quality with my stereo pano Unity viewer in great even with large stereo panoramas in anaglyph or SBS mode on my regular monitor (2560*1440). It is fun to add animated CG elements -- the stereo background provided by the panorama makes it easy to position the added elements very accurately and quickly in 3d viewing mode.

[Qix]

Wow! Lots of great info. Thanks for taking the time to post this for us. It's not easy to find information on stereoscopic panoramas. I'm really interested in learning how to do this kind of photography.

You mentioned that you were also using Unity3d. How did you separate the left and right camera?
I'm not a programmer and can't figure out how to move the left and right camera without them going back to their default position of X -0.032 /0.032 when I hit play. It seems the Gear Vr sdk locks them to this position. Any advice on how to do this? Very appreciate it.

[Gusev]

Can someone explain why some stereo 360 panorama rigs have two GoPro's mounted portrait, some landscape, and some diagonal?

[mediavr]

Can someone explain why some stereo 360 panorama rigs have two GoPro's mounted portrait, some landscape, and some diagonal?

Vertical coverage is the major factor, so sometimes diagonal is used. But if the whole fisheye circle is being imaged anyway then orientation of the camera makes no difference and other factors will determine -- eg. have you a horizontal design already built.

[mediavr]

I have figured out how to convert quickly stereo 360 panoramas to the Carmack long strip cubic format for stereo panoramas for the Gear VR -- using After Effects -- and write about it here with a sample stereo panorama

https://www.reddit.com/r/GearVR/comment ... panoramas/