Super-sharp 3D cameras may come to your smartphone

Many 3D cameras and scanners produce rough images, especially as they get smaller and cheaper. You often need a big laser scanner just to get reasonably accurate results. If MIT researchers have their way, though, even your smartphone could capture 3D images you'd be proud of. They've developed a technique that uses polarized light (like what you see in sunglasses) to increase the resolution of 3D imaging by up to 1,000 times. Their approach combines Microsoft's Kinect (or a similar depth camera), a polarized camera lens and algorithms to create images based on the light intensity from multiple shots. The result is an imager that spots details just hundreds of micrometers across -- you'd be hard-pressed to notice any imperfections.

The concept would need significant tweaking for a smartphone-sized 3D camera, since it revolves around a mechanical filter. You'd likely have to use grids of polarization filters over the sensor, and that would drop the effective resolution. You wouldn't get 23-megapixel cameras for a while, folks. However, it would still be good enough that you could snap a photo of an object from your phone and get a high-quality 3D printout.



Read More: http://www.engadget.com/2015/12/02/polarized-3d-imaging/

3D Cameras Give Computers Brains, Much Bigger Brains

When the world shifted away from film-based cameras, digital cameras started to change how we interact with one another. Think selfies and social media, for starters. What if you could capture in 3D and view all angles of an object or person? That is partly what the Google GOOGL +0.00% Cardboard project allows in a virtual reality/augmented reality sort-of-way, with your smartphone. But you don’t need a special viewer with new 3D technology.

This video gives you an idea of what’s coming when you have a 3D camera — this particular scene above was done by Patrick Eleazar from Realidyne, using a GoPro Spherical cam setup (and some post-processing work). If you place your cursor in the video, you can move around in the scene — try it - drag left, right, up or down and you will see a near-360 degree view. Within his YouTube channel, there are several others to give you an idea of what’s possible in 3D.

3D cameras, to date, have not been widely adopted, but as I suggested in Is The 3D Camera Tipping Point Here? Apple, Intel, Google, Microsoft, Sony, we are about to see and experience more change. Partly, I believe we are going to see consumer adoption, thanks to devices like the Kinect, and now, Orbbec with its Astra Pro (which depends on being connected to a computer via USB) and Persee, a 3D camera-computer (which does not need a computer to operate).

Most of the 3D devices, gesture capture and motion tracking types, are receiving and processing only through a more powerful computing device – your laptop or the Xbox gaming console. Persee is different in that it has an onboard computer, charged to process what you are seeing and capturing, in real time. Arguably, this is a shift.

Read More: http://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2015/10/28/3-d-cameras-give-computers-brains-much-bigger-brains/