Quamera Uses 26 Cameras to Automatically Create Live 3D Environments

By now you’ve certainly used or at least heard of 360° camera rigs like the GoPro Omni or Ricoh Theta. As neat as they are, when viewing the results, you are taken into a sort of “rails shooter” environment where, though you can rotate where you are looking, you have to follow a predetermined path.

Mark Mullin, however, is working on something that instead takes images of an environment using 26 visually-overlapping Arducams, arranged in a rhombicuboctahedron, in order to create a true 3D environment. The cameras are coordinated by four BeagleBone Blacks, and the results are fused together with an NVIDIA Jetson TX1, then passed to AWS for cloud processing.

The goal of this fascinating build is to enable others to enter a shared virtual space, perhaps allowing a user to “have someone visit” his or her house, while the other person is in another location.

You can check out Mullin’s entire project log here.