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There oughta be a bullet time video booth

there.oughta.be

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Re: There oughta be a bullet time video booth

#32
post #28

I'm usually a big critic of AI, and I remember seeing people complaining years ago about increasing framerates with AI[0], but maybe this could be a good usecase. You do, say, half the cameras, and then some crafty solution to interpolate (filling in the edges with AI, some sort of angle adjust) [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KRb_qV9P4g

The tech to look out for in this space is called NeRF (Neural Radiance Fields). Just do a quick search on that term and you will find a whole bunch of videos that reconstruct 3d scenes using digital stills. I just saw a paper a couple of days ago showing advances in reconstructing human expressions that change over time using advanced techniques.

Yeah, the Frugal Man's Bullet-time is a DSLR, Instant NGP from NVIDIA, and COLMAP.

Re: There oughta be a bullet time video booth

#33
During the Pride festival in Toronto last year I swear they actually had something like this!

I fully remember I left for the bathroom and came back to my girlfriend and her bestie doing it, it was like you stood in the Center of the platform and the cameras rotated around or something?

I wish I could remember it more specifically, and it wasn’t perfect; but it struck me as strange that this was the first time I’d actually seen anyone even try!

Wish now I’d written down the company who was putting it on. It looked neat. :)

Re: There oughta be a bullet time video booth

#34
post #11

Seems a good place to ask: anyone know a good tutorial for building your own diy photo booth?

I quite like this one. It's crafty and cute https://hackaday.com/2019/12/22/build-a-dslr-photo-booth-the... , though there's no printing. It's not abundantly hard to bang together something functional, really. It's one of those projects where you just think about the components you have (Camera, Monitor), and then make an enclosure (or find 3d/laser files), then some code that's surely on github to sync them together…

A small printer, though; would turn it from a novelty into something you could e.g. install in a store you owned, and even if you just charged a buck a go it could still be a fun draw.

Got me thinking now what a tiny printing solution like that would/could look like!

EDIT: unsurprisingly, there’s a bunch of iOS/iPadOS solutions. You could theoretically base it off a custom app on an iPad with one of these iThing printers stuffed away and use Square as a POS?

Re: There oughta be a bullet time video booth

#36

That camera had an MSRP of $899 when it was new in 2006 [0]. Amazing that they now sell for only £50, and still take fantastic pictures even by today's standards [1]. Technological progress is nothing short of remarkable. [0] https://kenrockwell.com/canon/rebel-xti.htm [1] https://onfotolife.com/camera_sample_photos?camera_id=30&pag...

For anyone who is interested in older cameras I use a Canon Rebel T3i as a webcam and it works fantastically. In 2020 because of you-know-what Canon released a webcam driver for a bunch of their cameras and the T3i is one of the oldest ones supported (the most recent version of their driver drops support for this camera but older drivers work just fine).

Paired with an AC power adapter and a mount for my monitor it's a nice webcam. I bought a 24mm lens for it that was reasonably affordable and I get a nice "real" bokeh effect in my background (it's not as blurry as the computational one but it's a nice to have). (FWIW I also push it through OBS to crop it).

Re: There oughta be a bullet time video booth

#37
post #4
post #2

You could probably set this up at county fairs and charge 20 bucks a pop. really cool setup.

The creator of this is also the person behind Phyphox, an app that turns your smartphone into tool to conduct physics experiments with and collect data from them, creator of a Game Boy WiFi cartridge and GB Interceptor that allows to record videos of Game Boy games - among other things. Amazing what some people do, isn't it? https://phyphox.org/ https://github.com/Staacks/wifi-game-boy-cartridge https://github.com/St…

Phyphox is such a cool tool. The acceleration spectrogram is so cool to look at - you can put your phone top of your PC/laptop and measure the RPM of fans and spinning drives.

Re: There oughta be a bullet time video booth

#38

That camera had an MSRP of $899 when it was new in 2006 [0]. Amazing that they now sell for only £50, and still take fantastic pictures even by today's standards [1]. Technological progress is nothing short of remarkable. [0] https://kenrockwell.com/canon/rebel-xti.htm [1] https://onfotolife.com/camera_sample_photos?camera_id=30&pag...

Can these really use all of those old 35mm Canon lenses?

Re: There oughta be a bullet time video booth

#39

There already is a company that rents out a system like this called the A-1 Array: https://www.array.cam/ I first saw this at an art installation in Brooklyn in 2017.

That subtends a much lower angle. Also the "acceleration" and alternating mirroring in TFA to give the illusion of a 180 degree spin is a brilliant idea.
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