Stereoscopy Video

[Destin]

Has anyone ever done/seen stereoscopy video from a heli?

Would it be possible to mount two micro heli cams to a heli?

I imagine the two cams would need to work on different frequencies so
as to work simultaneously. Are all micro cams on the same frequency?

Of course once you get that far, you would have two movie files that would need to be synchronized, and put together in a way for playback. Either with 3D goggles or maybe a custom stereoscopy viewer built around an LCD display.

I think it would be fun to try to build... and would be neat to see the video in 3D, as if you were actually flyin' around...

[wlfk]

Human stereo vision only works up to about 6 metres, so as soon as you get any higher than that then there's nothing to be gained by having 2 eyes rather than one. OK - there is - you get a wider field of vision and if you get a fly in one eye you can close it and use the other. Birds probably have 2 eyes to help with the landing and because evolution seemed to work that way.

The last time I raised this somebody told me that their stereo vision works at far larger distances than that. Some people have no stereo vision (and typically they don't know about it) whereas other people have considerably better stereo vision so I think it's feasible that some people will be able to use it up to e.g. 10M. But in most cases they're probably using other cues such as parallax error (fixate on a distant spot, then walk a few feet and see how objects even 100s of metres away seem to have moved relative to that distant point).

If you still want to try, the easiest way to do it might be optically - some kind of dual-periscope and a split field of view - then use a computer to reconstruct 2 images from the original 1. I think you're right to see the problem of synchronising frames as a problem. Say you're flying at 10m/s then a 1 frame discrepancy between the 2 eyes might lead to a z-distance of 40cm between cameras, compared to an inter-camera distance of only 10cm or so.

K