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Jump – Experiences like you're actually there

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Re: Jump – Experiences like you're actually there

#71
post #68
post #29

Looks great, though as other commenters have pointed out, 16 GoPros makes for an expensive rig. I've been watching this space for a while and pretty much all of the consumer varieties (usually Kickstarter-backed) have pretty terrible video quality, so it looks like I'll be sitting this one out for a while yet.

16 gopros isn't much more than a mid-range Canon DSLR, which TONS of amateurs manage to pony up the cash for. I don't think price will be a big inhibitor here, honestly.

Price is a huge inhibitor for a mid-range Canon DSLR, so it'll probably be a huge inhibitor for this system too.

Re: Jump – Experiences like you're actually there

#72
post #68
post #29

Looks great, though as other commenters have pointed out, 16 GoPros makes for an expensive rig. I've been watching this space for a while and pretty much all of the consumer varieties (usually Kickstarter-backed) have pretty terrible video quality, so it looks like I'll be sitting this one out for a while yet.

16 gopros isn't much more than a mid-range Canon DSLR, which TONS of amateurs manage to pony up the cash for. I don't think price will be a big inhibitor here, honestly.

Uhhmm... how much do you think gopro 4's cost?

Re: Jump – Experiences like you're actually there

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is definitely overlap in the FOV of the cameras that are adjacent to each other (GoPros in 16:9 generally have about a 120 degree field of view, though specifics depend upon which GoPro models is being used), so I assume they timesync the individual videos and use that overlap information to determine relative depths of things.

In order to do Stereoscopy properly, you need the axes of the camera barrel to intersect having a set of cameras all radially pointed outward doesn't achieve this.

The end user never sees the raw video in this case so that's not a requirement -- they're generating lots of synthetic stereoscopic views for the user by post-processing the video and accounting for depth.

I'll be interested to see what data they're sending to the video player to provide both stereoscopy and 360-panoramic video at the same time. The methods I can think of offhand require real-time pixel-shuffling to assemble the proper view during playback but maybe they figured out something else.

Re: Jump – Experiences like you're actually there

#74
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 16-GoPro rig isn't for a home user, it's for YouTube channel owners and other video publishers who are making money from their videos and want some more immersive content.

Well, I guess my point is that this is a bit overkill. A professional content producer may want higher quality than consumer gopro cameras. Whereas a home user (who may also want to create such immersive content) is left out in the lurch.

with a 90 degree FOV (such as oculus) you are looking at the feed from 4 go pros at any moment. the hero 3+ does 4K, so you're reducing four 4K feeds into a single 1080p/2 (oculus DK2) feed.

When you're going from 33 megapixels to 1 megapixel, i'm not sure how much optics is going to matter...

Re: Jump – Experiences like you're actually there

#75
post #47

I love all the experimentation in this area but I'm afraid systems like this are going to fall into a sort of uncanny valley of VR. Your brain is incredibly good at picking out the discrepancies between the real world and a high-resolution 120fps image with surround sound - just as it is incredibly good at recognizing objects and motions masquerading as human. It's like going from 2D/24FPS to 3D/48FPS. You'd think it…

Pay careful attention to her reaction: https://i.imgur.com/avVTybvh.jpg The brain is actually fairly easily tricked. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/05/2...

Sure, the brain is trickable. We had people jumping out of the way of the train and gunshot in "The Great Train Robbery" as well, of course. Notably the guillotine simulator that is so effective is a virtual environment, which is what I was suggesting will be the rule for a while in VR.

Re: Jump – Experiences like you're actually there

#77
post #60

Something that's maybe not clear from that page, but was mentioned in the Google IO keynote: this is not just stitching of multiple video streams. Google does some heavy-duty machine learning / computer vision on their servers to extract 3D information from these video streams (they mentioned having depth data). Then they presumably re-generate seamless stereoscopic 360-degree video from this 3D model. That's how the…

Yes. I wrote the code for the http://www.3d-4u.com 3D camera. You definitely can not use simple still image stitching algorithms. Per pixel depth estimation (via dense stereo matching) and subsequent blending must be used. I would say more, but I had to sign a long NDA before I worked on this.

Re: Jump – Experiences like you're actually there

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gopro's cost is about the same I guess The GoPro Hero4 costs $400.

But the GoPro Hero is only $130 and is physically the same size.

And the lower resolution and features probably don't matter when you stitching together 16 streams.

Re: Jump – Experiences like you're actually there

#79
post #2

Almost impossible to read that font on my machine. edit: I'm on Linux/Firefox. I assume it has to do with what font sets I have installed.

I suppose you're talking about the "Roboto" font in #737373. It's also hard to read with Chrome on Windows 7 and a standard 1920x1200 monitor. The same thing happened when Google Fi launched. Either they don't test enough on certain platforms or it's just that corporate design takes precedence over good readability on certain platforms.

Re: Jump – Experiences like you're actually there

#80

Has anyone though through doing this with binocular vision in all directions? just thinking about the geometry, I can't thing of a way to do it without a truly egregious amount of sensors.

I wonder if you couldn't just display the same video to each eye, offset by 10 degrees or so.
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