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The next phase of democratisation of porn could be a proliferation of portable VR recorders that will be invented later this century.

by meric 11y ago

soylentcola 11y ago
The problem with a portable VR recorder is that VR ideally records the whole volume of a space in 3 dimensions. People are developing camera arrays that do a decent approximation of 360-degree, 3d video through multiple wide angle lenses and software stitching and interpolation. But I think that the real "wow" moment will come when you can plug in 3 or more affordable, high-definition video and depth cameras around a room. The way I envision it, you have a power outlet on each of the four walls in a room, but higher up instead of near the ground. Into each outlet you plug in something that looks like a webcam but acts like a high def version of a Kinect or similar. Each cameras records both depth info and video. The cameras communicate wirelessly with a computer or other base unit that's running the "brains" of the operation. It receives the video and depth info and composites it into a live 3d model of the room with the video info used to create texture maps. I've done some really basic experiments with a single Kinect and the Oculus dev kit and they look about as good as you'd imagine. Blocky, flickery shapes, only viewable from one angle, with jagged edges and funky video. Still, it's already pretty cool looking. It already feels like something where incremental improvements in capture hardware and processing can make this very usable. Then once you've got these sorts of live 3d environments, it's just a matter of encoding, compressing, and transmitting the data over networks before you've got a decent semblance of live telepresence. I know this is a tangent from the porn discussion but as with a lot of tech, porn could easily be the industry to push development. I can imagine that live sex shows with real performers would be seen as premium services that companies can charge for (and *Tube sites couldn't immediately duplicate).

The next phase of democratisation of porn could be a proliferation of portable VR recorders that will be invented later this century.

by meric 11y ago

The next phase of democratisation of porn could be a proliferation of portable VR recorders that will be invented later this century.

soylentcola 11y ago

The problem with a portable VR recorder is that VR ideally records the whole volume of a space in 3 dimensions. People are developing camera arrays that do a decent approximation of 360-degree, 3d video through multiple wide angle lenses and software stitching and interpolation. But I think that the real "wow" moment will come when you can plug in 3 or more affordable, high-definition video and depth cameras around a room. The way I envision it, you have a power outlet on each of the four walls in a room, but higher up instead of near the ground. Into each outlet you plug in something that looks like a webcam but acts like a high def version of a Kinect or similar. Each cameras records both depth info and video. The cameras communicate wirelessly with a computer or other base unit that's running the "brains" of the operation. It receives the video and depth info and composites it into a live 3d model of the room with the video info used to create texture maps. I've done some really basic experiments with a single Kinect and the Oculus dev kit and they look about as good as you'd imagine. Blocky, flickery shapes, only viewable from one angle, with jagged edges and funky video. Still, it's already pretty cool looking. It already feels like something where incremental improvements in capture hardware and processing can make this very usable. Then once you've got these sorts of live 3d environments, it's just a matter of encoding, compressing, and transmitting the data over networks before you've got a decent semblance of live telepresence. I know this is a tangent from the porn discussion but as with a lot of tech, porn could easily be the industry to push development. I can imagine that live sex shows with real performers would be seen as premium services that companies can charge for (and *Tube sites couldn't immediately duplicate).