forums.naturalpoint.com

I had a thought about capture volumes with the new wand and software.

We don't need to have all our cameras pointing at the same point any more, am I right?

If so, would it be possible to, with a sufficently large number of cameras, set up a "corridor" of cameras to allow us to extend past the usual 12' square or so maximum?

I'm thinking something like this (apologies for ASCII Art):

2 cameras centered
^
6' apart

2 cameras 2 cameras

8' apart

2 cameras 2 cameras

8' apart

2 cameras 2 cameras

6' apart

v
2 cameras centered

As far as I can tell, it would be possible to wand the area using the new Optiwand, and at least 3 cameras should be able to see any point. And that should give us a capture space about 12' by 18', at a rough guess.

Am I insane or is this possible?

Yes, it should be possible to spread the cameras out more. They will "camera chain" so you can overlap by as little as 50% between camera to camera. Give it a try and see what works. We even recently did a capture volume that went around a corner in a room and it worked.

Awesome!

I must confess, my 3D math isn't quite up to working this out - if you've got a corridor of cameras, how widely apart can they be spread?

The position to get enough overlap is going to depend on how far the cameras are from the active capture volume area and what lens is in the camera. If you aren't sure about the overlap, use a reference marker and the cameras views to get it right. The best thing is to experiment and see what works. Don't forget that you'll still want enough coverage from different angles to get triangulation of the markers and redundancy in cases of occlusion.