The Woolf (multicam)
It's probably more than 10 years ago since many iterations of 3d printed parts ordered at Shapeways, trying out code and managing a crowd funding campaign. As a commercial phenomenon this didn't really latch on to an audience besides a couple of friends. As a viable product, the technique used and the theory behind it was a bit sub-ideal. Let's explore what's new...
As I mentioned in the introduction, the viability of the first Woolf (the name I gave the product) was not very good. To explain, what is the Woolf? The Woolf is a product that snaps in front of the iPhone camera to record stereoscopic video. Then either crossing (or parallelising) your eyes or using a cardboard viewer to view the video in 3d. So the first iPhone (iPhone 4) had only a single camera, and to split the view for a stereo view pair was just stretching it too far.
Now however I own a iPhone 12 Pro. This is not yet a stereo capable device, because the zoom is not equal for the different camera's and they are not far enough apart. So as pictured in the image, what the mirrors do is effectively split the view origin so that they are filming as if they were as much apart from each other as a pair of human eyes.
Because I haven't created an app that captures the camera's simultaneously and crops automatically the wide angle camera to match the telephoto camera, I still need to do some manual adjustment of the captured video. To record both camera's I used the code from a repository: https://github.com/Neos21/multi-cam, then I used the iOS photo's app to rotate and crop the videos so they become a matching stereo pair. And then I used the Blender composite node tree to create a side by side video.
Then I had some lenses lying around that I used to make a quick cardboard viewer, they distort a little but the result is nice enough. That being said, the results I'm having with my new prototype are way better than the mere proof of concept results that I had 10 years ago. Granted I still have some artefacts in my edges but if you're able to see the resulting video in 3d you will see that it's pretty good :)
So off to the next 10 years and who knows where this design will end up by that time :)