Steroscopic Rig Requires Only One Camera

[courtervideo] shares an instructible with us on how to build a mirror rig to take stereoscopic pictures with one camera. We’ve had the thought “couldn’t you just do that with some mirrors?” when looking at a dual camera rig. Well, as we all suspected, you can. There are some advantages here, a single click gives you your 3d image or video without any post processing, and unless you just happen to have an extra camera lying around you can save money there. You do however lose some resolution compared to two separate cameras. This setup could actually add some steps if you were wanting to interlace your images for viewing on a 3d tv.

16 thoughts on “Steroscopic Rig Requires Only One Camera

  1. This is a well known system, there are images of my 4mirror rig on my website and you can find more information at 3dphoto.net forums for stereo photographers.
    This system is easier than 2 cameras because you have no sync problems with the video later.

  2. That’s a lot of exposed optics to keep clean. It would be good to put it inside a cheap acrylic case like maybe a reptile tank; then when the acrylic gets scuffed up you can just replace it without having to polish the crap out of your mirrors all day long.

  3. For playing back video captured with this most (if not all) 3D tv’s support side-by-side HDMI input, you just send the video with the 2 separate images down scaled to half their width and combined into a single frame and you can set the TV to interlace them with a press of a button.

    If your feeling extra adventurous you can try adding the HDMI 1.4a spec 3D header information to the stream and the TV will interlace it automatically (this may have to be done in hardware, not sure, also the 3DTv will have to support it). HDMI 1.4 defines a bunch of pretty simple standards for 3D (the 3D part of the spec is available for free, after some annoying sign-up stuff from the hdmi website).

  4. Can’t wait to see the headcam version ;)

    Good point about no sync issues as with using two cameras, which is especially important when shooting video because even slightly out of sync and things don’t quite seem right, like watching anaglyph or side-by-side version of footage which was shot/created especially for field-sequential viewing as each frame for each eye is offset to each other time wise.

  5. Well, weird thought here, but I wonder if you could make a one-eyed person learn to see in 3d again with something like this. I guess it would have to be a person whose eye only looked straight ahead.

  6. Uh….OK….but….

    It’s common knowledge amongst photographers that viewing a single image with just one eye open will also produce the 3-D effect. Works on TV, too.

    And the ‘one-eyed person’, although the 3-D effect isn’t normally perceived in the real world, should still be able to perceive the 3-D effect with single photographs and TV, too.

    Why? Because viewing ‘flat images’ with just one eye open is much the same as seeing it like a camera lens sees it. The informational cues are there (depth of field, etc.) and the mind
    is able to matrix the information and create the optical illusion of depth.

    Try watching TV some time with one eye shut. It’s especially effective in close-up scenes with a lot of objects at varying distances and you’ll especially notice it when you see graphics superimposed over a commercial, for instance.

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