4 ms·

Something I've been wondering about - are your goggles stereoscopic, and does the drone have two cameras? I've (very, very briefly) looked in to FPV stuff but q

Something I've been wondering about - are your goggles stereoscopic, and does the drone have two cameras? I've (very, very briefly) looked in to FPV stuff but quickly get lost in marketing stuff that doesn't seem to clearly indicate if stereoscopic equipment is available.

jcims 5y ago
No stereo with the DJI goggles but there are some that do support it. There is enough reference info in the relative motion of objects while you are moving to create a 3D space in your mind. This instantly evaporates when you stop moving, however, particularly when near foliage.
bittercynic 5y ago
I haven't seen anything off-the-shelf, but I think this would be a really fun thing to set up. Maybe with a wider camera spacing to get some depth perception even at longer distances.
snypher 5y ago
Usually just one camera. I'm not sure if you could mount two far enough apart to get a good angle for a 3D tree.
bri3d 5y ago
No, almost all FPV pilots fly in 2D. Adding two cameras to an analog FPV setup would be trivial, but stereoscopic goggles are fairly non-existent, you'd have to try to produce a pipeline to get video into stereoscopic VR goggles without increasing latency to an unusable level - a very hard problem, really! With that said, I fly a lot of FPV (planes and wings) and I've never felt wanting for true stereoscopic 3D. I have flown a simulator on Oculus goggles in stereo and the experience wasn't that different - I think there's enough movement / visual cue that your brain is good at interpolating the 3D aspects anyway.
TooSmugToFail 5y ago
Vast majority of the FPV systems out there are indeed monoscopic. Stereoscopy is too resource-intensive for FPV, and it never caught on. The only viable digital system out there, DJI’s Air Unit and their Goggles, is really pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with available silicon, and they can only do a single-channel 720p low latency video stream over the air. Attempting to do digital FPV in stereoscopy would require additional compute on the encoding stage, and an additional Tx on the air unit. The AirUnit is rather chunky as it is, so having something that can do 2 simultaneous 720p channels would hardly be viable for a 5” drone, let alone 3”. It would also use extra radio channels too, halving the number of available channels (determining how many pilots can fly simultaneously; currently at a max of 8 - at least theoretically). The rest of video systems on the FPV market are still analog (in PAL/NTSC). Interestingly enough, a few years ago a rather obscure Chinese FPV brand Skyzone had goggles which supported a stereo FPV camera block. Basically, their rig had two cameras, each transmitting over its dedicated video Tx, and the goggles were equipped with two video Rx (VRx) units, each capable displaying video on a separate goggle display (left/right eyepiece). Most analog VRx units used for FPV today have two separate receivers, but they are used in ‘diversity’ mode, where they are tuned to the same channel. Skyzone also had twin Rx setup, but they could do both diversity and stereo. Thinking of it today, it was an amazing piece of speculative innovation that FPV is rife with, but as I said: it never caught on. People that used it were like ‘wow, it’s different...’ but I never saw anyone do a build with that for something more than a ‘Hey look: stereo FPV’ type of YouTube videos. My guess is: you need to get rather close to stuff in order to be able to perceive depth afforded by a stereoscopic system with cameras set at a distance small enough to fit on an FPV drone. Possibly a bit too close, for an FPV drone. So it never really made sense I guess, and so it never caught on...
difosfor 5y ago
I would imagine you could quite efficiently encode a second view that's largely the same as the first You'd need more processing power, but not much more bandwidth that way. But the VR 180 videos I've seen so far just seem to do side by side encoding. I guess you need hardware accelerated encoding and decoding for practical use so that's preventing such a new codec for now. Unless the side by side approach is already efficient at this
- jcims 5y ago
  There are stereo lens adapters that might get the job done without any additional electronics. Resolution would suffer but the extra spatial acuity might make up for it.

jcims 5y ago

No stereo with the DJI goggles but there are some that do support it. There is enough reference info in the relative motion of objects while you are moving to create a 3D space in your mind. This instantly evaporates when you stop moving, however, particularly when near foliage.

bittercynic 5y ago

I haven't seen anything off-the-shelf, but I think this would be a really fun thing to set up. Maybe with a wider camera spacing to get some depth perception even at longer distances.

snypher 5y ago

Usually just one camera. I'm not sure if you could mount two far enough apart to get a good angle for a 3D tree.

bri3d 5y ago

No, almost all FPV pilots fly in 2D. Adding two cameras to an analog FPV setup would be trivial, but stereoscopic goggles are fairly non-existent, you'd have to try to produce a pipeline to get video into stereoscopic VR goggles without increasing latency to an unusable level - a very hard problem, really! With that said, I fly a lot of FPV (planes and wings) and I've never felt wanting for true stereoscopic 3D. I have flown a simulator on Oculus goggles in stereo and the experience wasn't that different - I think there's enough movement / visual cue that your brain is good at interpolating the 3D aspects anyway.

TooSmugToFail 5y ago

Vast majority of the FPV systems out there are indeed monoscopic. Stereoscopy is too resource-intensive for FPV, and it never caught on. The only viable digital system out there, DJI’s Air Unit and their Goggles, is really pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with available silicon, and they can only do a single-channel 720p low latency video stream over the air. Attempting to do digital FPV in stereoscopy would require additional compute on the encoding stage, and an additional Tx on the air unit. The AirUnit is rather chunky as it is, so having something that can do 2 simultaneous 720p channels would hardly be viable for a 5” drone, let alone 3”. It would also use extra radio channels too, halving the number of available channels (determining how many pilots can fly simultaneously; currently at a max of 8 - at least theoretically). The rest of video systems on the FPV market are still analog (in PAL/NTSC). Interestingly enough, a few years ago a rather obscure Chinese FPV brand Skyzone had goggles which supported a stereo FPV camera block. Basically, their rig had two cameras, each transmitting over its dedicated video Tx, and the goggles were equipped with two video Rx (VRx) units, each capable displaying video on a separate goggle display (left/right eyepiece). Most analog VRx units used for FPV today have two separate receivers, but they are used in ‘diversity’ mode, where they are tuned to the same channel. Skyzone also had twin Rx setup, but they could do both diversity and stereo. Thinking of it today, it was an amazing piece of speculative innovation that FPV is rife with, but as I said: it never caught on. People that used it were like ‘wow, it’s different...’ but I never saw anyone do a build with that for something more than a ‘Hey look: stereo FPV’ type of YouTube videos. My guess is: you need to get rather close to stuff in order to be able to perceive depth afforded by a stereoscopic system with cameras set at a distance small enough to fit on an FPV drone. Possibly a bit too close, for an FPV drone. So it never really made sense I guess, and so it never caught on...

difosfor 5y ago

I would imagine you could quite efficiently encode a second view that's largely the same as the first You'd need more processing power, but not much more bandwidth that way. But the VR 180 videos I've seen so far just seem to do side by side encoding. I guess you need hardware accelerated encoding and decoding for practical use so that's preventing such a new codec for now. Unless the side by side approach is already efficient at this

jcims 5y ago
There are stereo lens adapters that might get the job done without any additional electronics. Resolution would suffer but the extra spatial acuity might make up for it.