20 March, 2013

Giant Point of View with the Oculus Rift and a drone

There is one application of the Oculus Rift I would like to see, lets call it the Giant Point of View of GPOW. The basic principle is to capture an image with a 3D camera (or two cameras) with objectives far apart (further apart then the distance between eyes), and then observe the video stream (or recording) using the Oculus Rift. If the cameras were placed on a drone like a quad-copter flying through a city. Watching the video could feel like a first person Godzilla rampage.

The parallax effect is increased, giving the observer an enhanced perception of depth. In practice everything (trees, buildings, cars, people) should look small, ant the observer should feel like a giant.

The idea comes from XKCD, but there is also an old military technology (binoculars with objective lenses far apart) based on the same principle. I remember it from some old communist era military education school book, but I was not able to find any examples with a quick search on Google. The closest I could get to were "periscope binoculars".

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