3 ms·

I want to know why cannot the multiple cameras on my phone be used to create 3D images.

• tomw1808 2y ago
  They can, or? Apple calls that spatial videos, or does that work differently?
  • Philpax 2y ago
    Yes, the spatial videos that iPhones can record are just stereoscopic video. This hasn't been cloned by other manufacturers because there have been very few viewing devices that they own, but that might change with Android XR.
• dist-epoch 2y ago
  Because they are not the same focal length? Although I'm sure software can mitigate that to some extent.
• regularfry 2y ago
  They're not far enough apart. Stereo vision on humans is best inside 3-5 metres, usually, and by 10 metres out is not that great. That's with pupils 65mm apart, give or take. Now scale that down to the horizontal distance between lenses on a phone. Coincidentally on mine they are about 13mm apart. You just multiply everything down linearly: my camera has the same experience at 60mm distance from an object as I do at 3m. It would be pretty useless past 2m, but also with those constraints you'd notice the quality drop off with range within a single object that was approaching 50cm depth. Now that's OK itself, you could get some useful work done with that, but there are so many provisos to it that it would be very hard to sell as a feature. To top that off it's algorithmically painful. There's a reason the commercial 3D scanners don't (typically, only) use stereo pairs; there's almost always a better way to do it.
  • regularfry 2y ago
    (oh, and to get out ahead of questions: Spatial Video capture on the iphone 15 apparently uses the LIDAR sensor for the depth map, not just the cameras)