ISee3D Pushing Pros of Single-Lens 3D Capture For Camcorders, Webcams

ISee3D was in New York Thursday to promote developments in its single-lens 3D technology that the company hopes to sell to CE manufacturers of webcams, digital still cameras and camcorders. The technology is expected to launch in a camcorder line from DXG next month, according to a spokeswoman for DXG, but pricing and product details weren’t available by our deadline. DXG currently sells a dual-lens 3D camcorder, the DXG-5D7V, for $599.

New advances in ISee3D’s technology include shaving the thickness of elements to “fractions of a millimeter,” making it possible to use the technology with a wider variety of lenses and reduce the space required for 3D capture, according to Shawn Veltman, ISee3D product manager. The company is positioning the technology for digital still and video applications where space is at an “absolute premium” and 3D performance is critical, Veltman told us. In medical applications, the ability to capture 3D images through a smaller device enables less-invasive surgeries, and the company recently improved light output for such applications, he said.

For the consumer market, iSee3D’s image-capture technology is display-agnostic, Veltman said. In our demo, Veltman showed us 3D still and motion video viewable with active-shutter classes and the ViewSonic PJD6531 3D projector. “We can work with pretty much any display system,” he said. The ISee3D single-lens solution adds “a buck or two” in component costs per unit, but those costs are offset by the elimination of a second lens, Veltman said. The benefits of a single-lens 3D solution over dual-lens are the ability to shoot macro shots without alignment differences and to zoom while maintaining auto-focus, Veltman said. It eliminates potential issues associated with dual lenses including color imbalance, vertical misalignment or rotational misalignment, he said. “We're able to get up close without any of the issues that pop up with two lenses,” he said.

The ability to zoom and maintain a 3D image is difficult with consumer-grade 3D cameras because the lenses need to be perfectly aligned vertically and rotationally, Veltman said. “Even the smallest amount of vertical misalignment can cause headaches and dizziness,” he said. That’s especially prevalent in live capture situations such as sporting events, and even wind in a stadium can cause enough vertical misalignment in dual-lens systems to produce a nauseating effect, he said. The company is not currently pursuing the broadcast market, though, due to low volume and high camera costs, Veltman said.

According to Veltman, two lenses from the same family and production line can have slight variations that affect viewing, he said. Minor differences in color and focal length that wouldn’t be noticeable from lens to lens “become problematic when you're trying to match images in 3D,” he said. “Our brains are very sensitive to those differences,” and that comes into play specifically with zooming, he said. “If there’s even the slightest difference in focal length between lenses,” he said, “you'll end up with different focus points that will cause viewing discomfort."

In its project with DXG, ISee3D will license its patent portfolio and provide an engineering team to assist in the development of the lens and associated components, Veltman said. The company owns 20 patents, he said. ISee3D is realizing “fairly good” 3D from prototypes it has produced with off-the-shelf still and video cameras, Veltman said. Through a 20mm lens, the company is achieving 12mm of separation for left and right images, compared with the 65mm separation typically prescribed for dual-lens 3D cameras. “If you're trying to do orthostereoscopy, which mimics the human eye, you do need 65mm of separation,” Veltman said, “but you also need to control the screen size and how far people are sitting from the screen.” The actual distance between the images “is much less important” for having good 3D than the quality of the images, he said.

ISee3D’s hardware solution uses a liquid-crystal element that blocks one side of the lens and then the other, Veltman said. The space between the centers of the two images creates the interaxial distance that would be created in a dual-lens system, and by blocking the lens, “you're pushing the centers over to create left and right images,” he said.

A 1/60th-second frame delay makes the sequential-frame method best for standard, not high-speed, shooting such as sports, Veltman said. The company also can deliver a parallel solution for high-speed scene capture but with a trade-off in resolution. “If we're capturing in sequence, we can capture each image at the full sensor resolution of 1920 by 1080,” he said. Capturing in parallel requires splitting the sensor, he said. “If we have a 4K sensor, we can still output HD, but a 1920 x 1080 sensor would be halved to 960,” he said. In most situations, a 1/60th second delay between left and right frames “would not be noticeable,” he said.

ISee3D is targeting other CE manufacturers and is working on prototypes of 3D systems for the medical, industrial vision, medical research and automotive markets. Veltman cited backup systems that automatically brake if a vehicle is too close to a wall or curb, or sensors that would measure a driver’s distance from the steering wheel and automatically adjust the seat position. Further out, he said, is a sensor that detects where the driver and passengers are in space so that in case of airbag deployment, it can deploy at a different angle depending on height and weight and “how far a person is leaning in,” he said. The less that a computer system has to search to find pixels that match left and right images, the quicker the algorithm operates, he said. Early on, the company is focusing on the consumer side because CE products get to market more quickly, but long term Veltman expects the technology to find most use in the medical and industrial fields.