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I got curious how much space it would take to have enough spherical panoramas of the YC office to walk freely around it like in a first person shooter game. No
by bemmu 12y ago
I got curious how much space it would take to have enough spherical panoramas of the YC office to walk freely around it like in a first person shooter game. No 3D model involved, just a panorama for every possible position the user might want to walk to.
I think 60 frames per second would be smooth enough. Walking speed 5km/hour is roughly 1 meter/second. Per frame distance then is about 0.02 meters.
Looking at the map the YC office seems to be about 30 x 40 meters. Imagining a grid with lines each 0.02 meters overlaid on it, it seems you would need 3000000 panoramas. That might sound way too many, but wait! We live in the future.
One spherical panorama of 10000x5000 pixels seems to be about 4MB jpeg-compressed. So you would need only 12 terabytes of space. Also since you need 60 of these each second, you need storage that can move 240MB/sec, which is lower than the current speeds of SSDs.
1TB SSD seems to cost about $400, so for only $4800 you would have enough speedy space to store the panoramas. Enough space to explore whole YC building with no snapping at all between frames, with complete realism. Actually you could even do stereo 3D, as you already have the data.
Now it's a different question entirely on how we could take those 3000000 panoramas. Even if you had a Double Robotics bot with a spherical camera attached to it going around the space, snapping 10 panoramas per second, it would take 4 days to complete. While that itself is tolerable, how it would know its position and control its movement to the required accuracy I have no idea.
Still it blows my mind that storing all that would be possible.
- exit 12y agoi wonder how much being stuck on a 2d plane would matter. otherwise, how many degrees of freedom do we need in the vertical axis? also, it assumes you can only continuously walk through the space right? what about standing still and swaying your head sub-2cm?
- ambarisha 12y agoA simple optimization can probably make things much better. If you think of it, the delta between panaromas corresponding to two adjacent points is very little. So, compressing image data across panaromas instead of each separately, I think, will make it _so_ much better. Interesting thought exercise, thanks.
- mixedbit 12y agoSuch grid would mean that you can move straight only in 8 directions, all other camera rotations would need to be rounded to these 8 directions. I think this can result in quite 'jumpy' movement, but maybe human won't be able to notice such jumps?
- Igglyboo 12y agoI would definitely notice a jump like that in a video game, I'm guessing you'd need over 100 to make it seem smooth.
- GrantS 12y agoMicrosoft Research published an early version of what you describe in 2004, "Image-Based Interactive Exploration of Real-World Environments": Paper: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ivt/CGA04.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/iv... Web Page, Video, Slides: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ivt/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/iv... Quoting: "Whereas many previous systems have used still pho- tography and 3D scene modeling, we avoid explicit 3D reconstruction because it tends to be brittle."