19 ms·

I'm guessing it's a beam splitting prism with 2 paths, one for wide angle, and the other for telephoto. They used to make cameras with 3 ccds for color video.

ruined 2y ago
the press release specifies there's no offset/parallax which would rule this out
- IshKebab 2y ago
  No it wouldn't?
  - ruined 2y ago
    you're correct, i misread the parent post
- tobyhinloopen 2y ago
  no because the light enters the same lens
londons_explore 2y ago
I'm guessing it's a regular camera lens, surrounded by a wide angle lens which is donut-shaped. Both images end up superimposed on the sensor, and there is probably a lot of distortion too, but for AI that might not be an issue.
- 0_____0 2y ago
  Needlessly complex, and machine vision camera users don't like the ambiguity that comes with ML processing on the frontend of their own stuff.
  - rurban 2y ago
    And I would have no idea how to calibrate it. If it produces an EXR with clearly seperate images with different lenses, fine. Like a 3D EXR with left and right.
    - londons_explore 2y ago
      Depending on the lens production process, the relationship between the wide angle and regular angle might be fully defined (ie. you don't need to calibrate it, you can just read the transformation matrices off the datasheet and it's gonna be correct to within 0.1 pixels).
  - londons_explore 2y ago
    True, but if you're going for frontend ML, which is effectively a black box anyway, you might as well have some non-human-understandable bits in the optics and hardware too. Various designs for microlens arrays do similar things - thousands of of 0.001 megapixel images from slightly different angles are fairly useless for most human uses, but to AI it could be a very powerful way to get depth info, cut the camera thickness by 10x, and have infinite depth of focus.
    - 0_____0 2y ago
      not sure how you took the idea "we want wide and narrow views of the same perspective" and thought building a light field camera might be a practical approach
      - mikewarot 2y ago
        While it is possible to build a consumer lightfield camera (Lytro was one example), they aren't as magical as you might think until you get much larger lens sizes than people are going to tolerate to get appreciable zoom range. I did a bunch of manual creation of light-field photos over the years.[1] To get interesting compositions, you need an effective lens diameter of about 30 cm in diameter or more. To get super-resolution good enough for zoom, you're going to probably need something that size. [1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/---mike---/albums/72177720297918810/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/---mike---/albums/721777202979...
0_____0 2y ago
From my time with optics this seems the most likely setup. Getting good optical efficiency out of the setup might take some cleverness though - ideally you're not dumping loads of light that are "out of frame" for one sensor. The other option is concentric optics with a pick out mirror for the central light path. Bit harder to make but you get more flexibility re: how much of your light collecting area gets split to which sensor.

ruined 2y ago

the press release specifies there's no offset/parallax which would rule this out

IshKebab 2y ago
No it wouldn't?
- ruined 2y ago
  you're correct, i misread the parent post
tobyhinloopen 2y ago
no because the light enters the same lens

londons_explore 2y ago

I'm guessing it's a regular camera lens, surrounded by a wide angle lens which is donut-shaped. Both images end up superimposed on the sensor, and there is probably a lot of distortion too, but for AI that might not be an issue.

0_____0 2y ago
Needlessly complex, and machine vision camera users don't like the ambiguity that comes with ML processing on the frontend of their own stuff.
- rurban 2y ago
  And I would have no idea how to calibrate it. If it produces an EXR with clearly seperate images with different lenses, fine. Like a 3D EXR with left and right.
  - londons_explore 2y ago
    Depending on the lens production process, the relationship between the wide angle and regular angle might be fully defined (ie. you don't need to calibrate it, you can just read the transformation matrices off the datasheet and it's gonna be correct to within 0.1 pixels).
- londons_explore 2y ago
  True, but if you're going for frontend ML, which is effectively a black box anyway, you might as well have some non-human-understandable bits in the optics and hardware too. Various designs for microlens arrays do similar things - thousands of of 0.001 megapixel images from slightly different angles are fairly useless for most human uses, but to AI it could be a very powerful way to get depth info, cut the camera thickness by 10x, and have infinite depth of focus.
  - 0_____0 2y ago
    not sure how you took the idea "we want wide and narrow views of the same perspective" and thought building a light field camera might be a practical approach
    - mikewarot 2y ago
      While it is possible to build a consumer lightfield camera (Lytro was one example), they aren't as magical as you might think until you get much larger lens sizes than people are going to tolerate to get appreciable zoom range. I did a bunch of manual creation of light-field photos over the years.[1] To get interesting compositions, you need an effective lens diameter of about 30 cm in diameter or more. To get super-resolution good enough for zoom, you're going to probably need something that size. [1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/---mike---/albums/72177720297918810/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/---mike---/albums/721777202979...

0_____0 2y ago

From my time with optics this seems the most likely setup. Getting good optical efficiency out of the setup might take some cleverness though - ideally you're not dumping loads of light that are "out of frame" for one sensor. The other option is concentric optics with a pick out mirror for the central light path. Bit harder to make but you get more flexibility re: how much of your light collecting area gets split to which sensor.