Sperical projection is used very commonly for example in Google Street View and of course in VR video.Īs we are in 3D, a regular angle wouldn’t be enough to describe all directions on a sphere, since 360° can only describe a full circle, a 2D shape. Still panoramas have been very commonly projected onto cylinders, not only in modern photo viewer software, but also in monumental paintings like the Racławice Panorama, which is housed inside a cylinder shaped building.īut to store information from each angle in 3D space we need a different geometric shape. Projecting our images on different shapes than planes in virtual space is not new at all though. Although this seems to be a physical limitation, there are some ways to overcome it, in particular with Curved LCD screens, fancy projector setups rarely seen in art installations and of course most recently: Virtual Reality Head Mounted Displays.
Nowadays mankind projects its imagery mostly onto planes, as seen on most LCD Screens, canvases and Polaroids. A brief history of mapping imagery on anything different than a plane A better solution for “real 3D” video would be of course capturing a point cloud with as many sensitive sensors as possible, filter it and construct mesh data out of it for rendering, but more on that later. Mapping the stereo video onto a sphere does not solve this, but at least it stores color information independent of view angle, so it’s way more immersive and gets described as telepresence experience. Stereoscopic video does not provide the full 3D information, since the perspective is always given for a certain view, or parallax. With its 1.6 release GStreamer added support for stereoscopic video, I didn’t test Side-By-Side stereo with that though. Side-by-side stereoscopic video was becoming very popular, due to “3D” movies and screens gaining popularity. It used the headset only as a stereo viewer and didn’t provide any tracking, it was just a quick way to make any use of the DK1 with GStreamer at all.
Three Years ago in 2013 I released an OpenGL fragment shader you could use with the GstGLShader element to view Side-By-Side stereoscopical video on the Oculus Rift DK1 in GStreamer. This article sums up some VR R&D work I have been doing lately at Collabora, so thanks for making this possible! ? Previously on GStreamer