Live Lightfield Rig with 12 RPi cameras

[Torkel]

I made a live lightfield rig with 12 raspberry pi cameras (not latest version, but with better lens). It's a big deal for me so I wanted to share it here

YouTube video: https://youtu.be/BGVFhFMRrUE

I am continually amazed by just how versatile and dependable the raspberry pi camera is and how much it can be used for!

(And to be completely clear: I did co-found and now work full time (more than full time actually..) at the company making this software, but this lightfield rig project is all me on late nights and weekends!)

[tonywaite]

Hi,
Thank you for a fabulous demo of your 'lightfield' technology!
I know that this technique is computationally intensive, but is there a subset of the software that could be released to show the 2D image-stitching/3D depth-of-field reconstruction?
Would such a *minimal* rig be two pi-cams into a compute module (or two pi-zero's)? Or do you need a 'monster' PC to crunch the figures in real time?

[Torkel]

Thanks

If you want to do the computations on the raspberry pis, I think that will be rather difficult. The computer in the video is running a GTX 970 which I would not call an insane GPU, but is still really powerful. The depth of field effect is also not so powerful if it's just two cameras - it looks more like a stitching defect than a light field

It's hard to break out an example of it as it's structured now... Will think about how it could be done, people are emailing me about it also...

[gordon77]

Are the pi cameras connected to pi's?

I assume so but you don't say that in the video?

[Torkel]

Yes! All twelve of them are connected to a RPi 3. Cabling was fun

(I used two of the cabinets I developed for this: http://odenvr.com/devkit/)

[Gavinmc42]

Good use for the new Pi Zero's with camera?

Then a Pi Zero cluster
http://hackaday.com/2016/01/25/raspberr ... s-a-punch/
to crunch the numbers using QPUlib?
https://github.com/mn416/QPULib

[HamburBaden]

Very nice!
When you say:

2 raspberry pi cameras (not latest version, but with better lens)

Can you share more details on what 'better lens' you went with and why?

[Torkel]

Thank you

It's a board that can be found on ebay and some other sites like that (e.g. Alibaba/express), I think this is it but my hotel wifi is so bad it has not managed to bring it up: http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-Camera-Modu ... 1352863840

That board has the old omnivision sensor attached directly to a black PCB with space for an S-mount for lenses. On the light field rig, eight of the cameras have 1.6mm lenses and four have 1.05mm lenses if remember it right. I used higher angle lenses on the sides to give more overview of the scene.

I haven't seen a version of such a board with the newer Sony sensor, but I'd be very interested in trying that if it comes out. The Sony sensor seems to be much better than the Omnivision. But with an even crappier stock lens (like - how is that even possible? that old Omnivision lens was atrocious...)