You Could Turn Your Hike Into a VR Experience With This Experimental Camera Rig

A consumer market for virtual reality headsets doesn't really exist yet, but the researchers behind an experimental camera prototype unveiled on Friday think their project, if commercialized, could be the first cheap and portable way for people to turn their hikes or family gatherings into immersive virtual reality experiences. Think of it like a GoPro, but for shooting in stereoscopic 3D.

The camera, which debuted at the IX Symposium for immersive experience in Montreal last week, was designed by Vincent Chapdelaine Couture and Sébastien Roy, both computer scientists, at the University of Montreal's 3D Vision Lab. The design of the camera rig is simple: the top half of the camera is made up of three cameras modified with fisheye lenses and arranged in a triangle. The bottom half is exactly the same.

This arrangement, combined with special image stitching software that uses an algorithm based on geometry, enables the camera to capture not just a 360 degree picture of its surroundings, but video in 3D with fewer cameras than is typically used.

"It's targeted at being small, portable, mobile, and simple," Roy said backstage at the symposium, before the pair unveiled the camera. "Most of the other [360 degree] cameras try to go really high-resolution, with sixteen cameras or something like that… It's expensive."

Current consumer devices for spherical video capture either don't do 3D, like the Bubl camera—although, apparently, they are working on it—or use upwards of 12 or even 16 cameras pointing in all directions to get the effect, like Jaunt VR's camera. According to Roy and Couture, this approach requires an incredible amount of work and processing power to stitch all the separate images together in post-production; not exactly ideal for the average user.

Couture and Roy claimto have solved this problem because the triangular six camera arrangement uses what's known as epipolar geometry; basically, the cameras' intersecting fields of vision can be cross-sectioned into triangles and then stitched into a unified stereoscopic image. "We wanted to solve both problems at once: less cameras, and less stitching," Roy said.

The result of this approach is a camera rig that forgoes complicated optics and an impressive-sounding number of cameras in favour of clever design and, hopefully, affordability on the manufacturing and consumer end. According to Couture, the final product would ideally cost people just a couple hundred dollars. For comparison, GoPro cameras from Best Buy cost anywhere from $169.99 to $629.99.

Before the conference, the camera had never been tested outside of the lab to record a full sphere film in 3D. A demo at IX involved a live stream from the camera—which was mounted to a tripod—to an Oculus Rift headset in the lobby of the building where the conference was held, however, and the final presentation of the symposium was recorded with the full rig.

Whether or not the finished product turns out well will be the true test of the system's eventual workability for consumers and content creators.

For now, Roy and Couture are focused on getting people to experiment with their rig and produce some content, so they can work out the system's hiccups. Eventually, they hope, someone will take notice and help them bring it to market. Until then, the camera is essentially a research project; the product of computer scientists who believe in the promise of virtual reality content created by the average person. Correction 05/25: An earlier version of this article stated that the camera prototype was constructed with GoPro cameras. This is incorrect, and stemmed from a misunderstanding during the interview. The actual model of the cameras used is a Mako-G419. The article has been updated.