Consumer depth sensing cameras?

4 points by computerslol 12 years ago | 5 comments

Are there such things as consumer cameras that take photos with depth maps? If not, why not? I know the Kinect does something similar at a price point that consumers can afford. Being able to use a depth map in conjunction with a photo would make separating your subject from background in an application like photoshop take moments. Being able to do the same with video would be incredible. This might be an area where a hardware startup could create something incredible.

fredophile 12 years ago |

Point Grey Research makes stereo and 360 cameras. They aren't really designed for consumer use though. The Nintendo 3DS also comes with a 3D camera.

I can think of a few reasons why you don't typically see this in consumer products. First is cost. You need two lenses and sensors. Second is workflow. There isn't a lot of consumer level software available for processing image pairs to get and use depth data. Third is display. Most people don't have 3D displays for looking at the final result. What else is a consumer going to do with this data? Points two and three combined lead to low demand for a product that does this.

hofstee 12 years ago |

Lytro does something similar, but with light fields instead of depth maps. https://www.lytro.com/camera/

computerslol 12 years ago | |

I'd much rather have a second image with a gray scale depth map. I took a look at the lytro, but it appears they have some weird proprietary image format.

Wogef 12 years ago |

http://www.rgbdtoolkit.com/

computerslol 12 years ago | |

Thanks :D