Comments on: Orientation aware camera

By: shams

shams — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 05:40:55 +0000

this is the great thing i admire this

By: water

water — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 14:17:20 +0000

You don’t need to go through the effort if you just want to make a quick panorama like that. Just shoot in video mode from one pivot point scanning the area, load the video frames as layers in Photoshop and have it auto-align them as a panorama. I’ve done this before – it was hi-res and the accuracy was near perfect.

By: jimmy

jimmy — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 17:34:18 +0000

wow… u rock I am impressed. it looks like so much fun!

By: quadrapod

quadrapod — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 04:56:51 +0000

I’m curious if the inaccuracy is really due to the sensors, or the simple fact that he is holding the camera. while it can sense up and down and its angle, it cant determine it’s coordinate location, so movement left or right would change the alignment of the pixels. perhaps a tripod mount is all it would take to fix this problem.

definitely an interesting project that i may be interested in building one day, when i have money.

By: kyle007

kyle007 — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 16:04:45 +0000

What if this technology became a house old trend? You would have a bunch of monitors surrounding you instead of one of two. I’m still waiting for a concaved or convex monitor; imagine playing new video games where you didn’t have to look with the mouse. You actually look with your head.

this is pretty cool!

By: Louis II

Louis II — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:26:51 +0000

amazing. I had just googled for this kind of thing… and lo it brings me here before my bi-weekly check of hackaday.

Perhaps this could be hacked/used to make a non-iPhone acquire some tilt features?

By: Grovenstien

Grovenstien — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:52:42 +0000

This is extremly usefull for collecting HDRI maps. Also remember those VR rides at theme parks well this just added a whole new level of reality. Bartsch i was think the same thing but with a laser range detector like a leica disto.

By: bartsch

bartsch — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 10:31:36 +0000

This is madness! Awesome!

Did you thought about combining it
with an ultrasonic range detector?

By: stewart greenhill

stewart greenhill — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 01:46:59 +0000

this is pretty cool, andrew. I especially like the real-time display with orientation. If you’re prepared to do some off-line number crunching you can get good image registration using SIFT-based keypoints. An easy way to do this is using Autostitch, which can be automated although its not really designed to do this.

check out the video example at the link below. I made this by “painting” a background panorama using a video camera, then stitching a live feed into the panorama. Autostitch works using only the images – your camera measures orientation, so if you waded through enough maths you should probably get a better result.

http://stewartgreenhill.com/blog/2008/07/22/a-batch-controller-for-autostitch/

By: Andrew Magill

Andrew Magill — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 23:59:35 +0000

Questioning the need for the magnetometer and assuming this could be done with only an accelerometer comes up a lot, so I’d like to correct that. Linear algebra says that you need two mutually orthogonal vectors to fully determine an orientation in 3D space. If I only had the accelerometers, I would only be able to determine pitch and roll, but never yaw. (Without looking, you can tell which position your body is in, but not which direction you’re facing, right?) Similarly with the magnetometers I could only determine yaw and pitch, but never roll. (Sort of.. Magnetic north actually points about 45 degrees into the ground around here.) So this wouldn’t really work with a wiimote, as it only has the accelerometers.
I’m honored to be compared with Johnny Chung Lee- I remember being blown away by the simplicity and brilliance in what he did. In fact, his video inspired me to make this one.
I think if I had a *MUCH* faster sample rate from the sensors, I could develop an algorithm to smooth out the jitters and improve accuracy. With such a slow sample rate, though, it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot I could do to improve the data from the current hardware without getting into some hardcore image analysis.

By: Tecratal

Tecratal — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 23:31:28 +0000

Hmmm this brings up the concept of wiimote+camera as possibly an easy way to achieve a similar thing without having to create your own usb device.

By: Stu

Stu — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 23:25:23 +0000

Andrew,
Let me be the first to congratulate and thank you for letting us see this fantastic project, its not often you see videos online that gives you a wide smile, and makes you keep saying ‘that is fantastic’ every so often!
Everything about what you’ve done seems so obvious, but of course, it really isn’t obvious at all. Apart from general panoramic photography, I haven’t seen anything like this before, its so ‘immediate’ and rewarding! Especially where it can auto-correct camera orientation AND generate full 360degree views!
Its just inspired!
I for one though would love it if you would make it much more accurate, less jittery, and maybe faster, as I’m kind of thinking its got a sort of ‘unfinished’ look to it.
But I do know where you’re coming from with the preference of that abstract visual effect.
Thanks again! You’ve given me the same big smile I had when I first saw Jeff Hans Multi-touch reel, and Johnny Chung Lees WiiMote PC based projects.
Thanks.

By: jukus

jukus — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 23:24:09 +0000

This is one of the best project i seen in a long time. fair play

By: dizzle

dizzle — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 23:23:37 +0000

the picture was somewhat distorted, if the sample rate was increased would the picture quality improve?

By: Andrew Magill

Andrew Magill — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 22:50:47 +0000

Hey cool, I’m on hackaday! :D
Thanks everyone. I’m probably not going to take this iteration of the project any farther.. the next logical step is autocorrelating the images to refine the alignment, and that’s a wee bit beyond what I want to do. Of course, everyone is more than welcome to make their own and hack up my source code, though.
I do notice that my brand new G1 phone has all the requisite hardware (camera, accelerometer, magnetometer) built-in, though.. I’ll definitely be investigating that.